he had given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that
the girl behind the counter had come to his aid. And what could it have
been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place?
Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the
General's precarious health? And what had been the nature of the insult
which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake
hands over? Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had
thrashed so well as to lay him up in bed? That incident had damaged two
people at least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodily welfare,
and me in my character as an upstanding man in the fierce feminine
estimation of Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set
right; my confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed.
As I sat with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of
reasoning one little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that
John Mayrant was no longer at ease or happy about his love affair. I
had never before met any young man in whose manner nature was so finely
tempered with good bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike
absent from him, and his bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness
as far removed from raw diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it
was altogether a rare and charming address in a youth of such true
youthfulness, but it had failed him upon two occasions which I have
already mentioned. Both times that he had come to the Exchange he had
stumbled in his usually prompt speech, lost his habitual ease, and
betrayed, in short, all the signs of being disconcerted. The matter
seemed suddenly quite plain to me: it was the nature of his errands to
the Exchange. The first time he had been ordering the cake for his own
wedding, and to-day it was something about the wedding again. Evidently
the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding made him painfully
conscious of the view which others must take of the part that Miss
Rieppe was playing in all this--a view from which it was out of his
power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that destroyed
his composure. From what I was soon to learn of his fine and unmoved
disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be the
right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely
heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders
must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same