al, as of public singing or
acting, about them. The young girl wore, instead of a travelling-suit, a
vivid light blue dress; and over her sky-blue eyes and fresh cheeks a
glory of corn-colored hair lay in great braids and masses. It was
magnificent, but it wanted distance; so near, it was almost harsh. Mr.
Arbuton's eyes fell from the face to the vivid blue dress, which was not
quite fresh and not quite new, and a glimmer of cold dismissal came into
them, as he gave himself entirely to the slender merits of the steamboat
breakfast.

He was himself, meantime, an object of interest to a young lady who sat
next to the English party, and who glanced at him from time to time, out
of tender gray eyes, with a furtive play of feeling upon a sensitive
face. To her he was that divine possibility which every young man is to
every young maiden; and, besides, he was invested with a halo of romance
as the gentleman with the blond mustache, whom she had seen at Niagara
the week before, on the Goat Island Bridge. To the pretty matron at her
side, he was exceedingly handsome, as a young man may frankly be to a
young matron, but not otherwise comparable to her husband, the
full-personed good-humored looking gentleman who had just added sausage
to the ham and eggs on his plate. He was handsome, too, but his full
beard was reddish, whereas Mr. Arbuton's mustache was flaxen; and his
dress was not worn with that scrupulosity with which the Bostonian bore
his clothes; there was a touch of slovenliness in him that scarcely
consorted with the alert, ex-military air of some of his movements.
"Good-looking young John Bull," he thought concerning Mr. Arbuton, and
then thought no more about him, being no more self-judged before the
supposed Englishman than he would have been before so much Frenchman or
Spaniard. Mr. Arbuton, on the other hand, if he had met an Englishman so
well dressed as himself, must at once have arraigned himself, and had
himself tacitly tried for his personal and national difference. He
looked in his turn at these people, and thought he should have nothing
to do with them, in spite of the long-lashed gray eyes.

It was not that they had made the faintest advance towards acquaintance,
or that the choice of knowing them or not was with Mr. Arbuton; but he
had the habit of thus protecting himself from the chances of life, and a
conscience against encouraging people whom he might have to drop for
reasons of society. This was some