As she took Meredith's arm, she handed her flowers to a gentleman beside
her with the slightest glance at the recipient; and the gesture and look
made her partner heartsick for his friend; it was so easy and natural and
with the air of habit, and had so much of the manner with which a woman
hands things to a man who partakes of her inner confidences. Tom knew
that Harkless divined the gesture, as well as the identity of the
gentleman. They started away, but she paused, and turned to the latter.
"Mr. Macauley, you must meet Mr. Harkless. We leave him in your care, and
you must see that he meets all the pretty girls--you are used to being
nice to distinguished strangers, you know."
Tom put his arm about her, and whirled her away, and Harkless felt as if a
soft hand had dealt him blow after blow in the face. Was this lady of
little baffling forms and small cold graces the girl who had been his kind
comrade, the girl who stood with him by the blue tent-pole, she who had
run to him to save his life, she who walked at his side along the pike?
The contrast of these homely scenes made him laugh grimly. Was this she
who had wept before him--was it she who had been redolent of kindness so
fragrantly natural and true--was it she who said she "loved all these
people very much, in spite of having known them only two days"?
He cried out upon himself for a fool. What was he in her eyes but a man
who had needed to be told that she did not love him! Had he not better--
and more courteously to her--have avoided the meeting which was
necessarily an embarrassment to her? But no; he must rush like a Mohawk
till he found her and forced her to rebuff him, to veil her kindness in
little manners, to remind him that he put himself in the character of a
rejected importunate. She had punished him enough, perhaps a little too
cruelly enough, in leaving him with the man to whom she handed bouquets as
a matter of course. And this man was one whose success had long been a
trumpet at his ear, blaring loudly of his own failure in the same career.
It had been several years since he first heard of the young editor of the
Rouen "Journal," and nowadays almost everybody knew about Brainard
Macauley. Outwardly, he was of no unusual type: an American of affairs;
slight, easy, yet alert; relaxed, yet sharp; neat, regular, strong; a
quizzical eye, a business chin, an ambitious head with soft, straight hair
outlining a square brow; and though he was "of a type," he was not
commonplace, and one knew at once that he would make a rattling fight to
arrive where he was going.