resting according to certain established
standards, it seems to have a "drawing" quality, a certain unexplained
fascination. Morgan says that it is the social unconventionality that
attracts, and that the American women are the loadstone. He declares.
that when an Englishman secures and carries home with him an American
wife, his curiosity about the country is sated. But this is generalizing
on narrow premises.

There was certainly in Lyon's letter a longing to see the country again,
but the impression it made upon me when I read it--due partly to its
tone towards Miss Forsythe, almost a family tone--was that the earldom
was an empty thing without the love of Margaret Debree. Life is so brief
at the best, and has so little in it when the one thing that the heart
desires is denied. That the earl should wish to come to America again
without hope or expectation was, however, quite human nature. If a man
has found a diamond and lost it, he is likely to go again and again and
wander about the field where he found it, not perhaps in any defined
hope of finding another, but because there is a melancholy satisfaction
in seeing the spot again. It was some such feeling that impelled
the earl to wish to see again Miss Forsythe, and perhaps to talk of
Margaret, but he certainly had no thought that there were two Margaret
Debrees in America.

To her aunt's letter conveying the intelligence of Mr. Lyon's loss,
Margaret replied with a civil message of condolence. The news had
already reached the Eschelles, and Carmen, Margaret said, had written
to the new earl a most pious note, which contained no allusion to
his change of fortune, except an expression of sympathy with his now
enlarged opportunity for carrying on his philanthropic plans--a most
unworldly note. "I used to think," she had said, when confiding what
she had done to Margaret, "that you would make a perfect missionary
countess, but you have done better, my dear, and taken up a much more
difficult work among us fashionable sinners. Do you know," she went on,
"that I feel a great deal less worldly than I used to?"

Margaret wrote a most amusing account of this interview, and added that
Carmen was really very good-hearted, and not half as worldly-minded as
she pretended to be; an opinion with which Miss Forsythe did not at all
agree. She had spent a fortnight with Margaret after Easter, and she
came back in a dubious frame of mind. Margaret's growing intimacy with
Carmen wa