ty had perished; a process less violent
but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had
ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses,
and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found.
Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song:
O tempo passato perche non ritorni?

And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard
saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings
hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with
his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom
House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried
his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all
full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a
young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four,
sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss
Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female
relatives?

With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead
them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which
might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not
ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I
thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go
to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must
keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered,
Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory,
of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:--

"--if he should share the family bad taste in wives."

"Eliza says she has no fear of that."

"Were I Eliza, Hugh's performance would make me very uneasy."

"Julia, John does not resemble Hugh."

"Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria."

"And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was
doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a
lady, at any rate."

Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. "Yes." It portended
something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. "A lady; but
do--any--ladies ever seem quite like our own?

"Certainly not, Julia."

You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a
clue.

"Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?"

"Two," Mrs. Gr