FullReads

“What a beautiful girl!” said Mr. Ambrose Drayton to himself; “and how much she looks like–” He cut the comparison short, and turned his eyes seaward, pulling at his mustache meditatively the while.

“This American atmosphere, fresh and pure as it is in the nostrils, is heavy-laden with reminiscences,” his thoughts ran on. “Reminiscences, but always with differences, the chief difference being, no doubt, in myself. And no wonder. Nineteen years; yes, it’s positively nineteen years since I stood here and gazed out through yonder gap between the headlands. Nineteen years of foreign lands, foreign men and manners, the courts, the camps, the schools; adventure, business, and pleasure– if I may lightly use so mysterious a word. Nineteen and twenty are thirty-nine; in my case say sixty at least. Why, a girl like that lovely young thing walking away there with her light step and her innocent heart would take me to be sixty to a dead certainty. A rather well-preserved man of sixty–that’s how she’d describe me to the young fellow she’s given her heart to. Well, sixty or forty, what difference? When a man has passed the age at which he falls in love, he is the peer of Methuselah from that time forth. But what a fiery season that of love is while it lasts! Ay, and it burns something out of the soul that never grows again. And well that it should do so: a susceptible heart is a troublesome burden to lug round the world. Curious that I should be even thinking of such things: association, I suppose. Here it was that we met and here we parted. But what a different place it was then! A lovely cape, half bleak moorland and half shaggy wood, a few rocky headlands and a great many coots and gulls, and one solitary old farmhouse standing just where that spick-and-span summer hotel, with its balconies and cupolas, stands now. So it was nineteen years ago, and so it may be again, perhaps, nine hundred years hence; but meanwhile, what a pretty array of modern aesthetic cottages, and plank walks, and bridges, and bathing-houses, and pleasure-boats! And what an admirable concourse of well-dressed and pleasurably inclined men and women! After all, my countrymen are the finest-looking and most prosperous-appearing people on the globe. They have traveled a little faster than I have, and on a somewhat different track; but I would rather be among them than anywhere else. Yes, I won’t go back to London, nor yet to Paris, or Calcutta, or Cairo. I’ll buy a cottage here at Squittig Point, and live and die here and in New York. I wonder whether Mary is alive and mother of a dozen children, or–not!”

“Auntie,” said Miss Leithe to her relative, as they regained the veranda of their cottage after their morning stroll on the beach, “who was that gentleman who looked at us?”

“Hey?–who?” inquired the widow of the late Mr. Corwin, absently.

“The one in the thin gray suit and Panama hat; you must have seen him. A very distinguished-looking man and yet very simple and pleasant; like some of those nice middle-aged men that you see in ‘Punch,’ slenderly built, with handsome chin and eyes, and thick mustache and whiskers. Oh, auntie, why do you never notice things? I think a man between forty and fifty is ever so much nicer than when they’re younger. They know how to be courteous, and they’re not afraid of being natural. I mean this one looks as if he would. But he must be somebody remarkable in some way–don’t you think so? There’s something about him–something graceful and gentle and refined and manly–that makes most other men seem common beside him. Who do you suppose he can be?”

“Who?–what have you been saying, my dear?” inquired Aunt Corwin, rousing herself from the perusal of a letter. “Here’s Sarah writes that Frank Redmond was to sail from Havre the 20th; so he won’t be here for a week or ten days yet.”