a
century, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when New
York, on the happy day, began to recede from view. Europe had surprises,
none the less, and who knows to what extent it may after half a century
have had shocks? The coming true of the old dream produced at any rate a
snap of the tense cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, in
the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in England
only to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look about
him in vague deprecation and give it all up. He just landed and died;
but the grand tour was none the less proceeded with--cousin Helen
herself, aided by resources personal, social and financial that left
nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feeling
of delicacy about it firmly overcome.

But it has taken me quite out of the other house, so that I patch up
again, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at which
my small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that if
Albert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt--which was a
perfectly nondescript relation--so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, was
her more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much
Albert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of the
three persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less have
begun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem to
have seized, definitely emerged from rustication--the Beaverkill had but
for a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity--and began, on
his side, to pace the well-worn field between the Fourteenth Street
windows and the piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there less
vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards to
loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present,
was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise for
that companion a possible history; the simple-minded Henry's annals on
the other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at
all. This happened as soon as one took in the ground and some of the
features of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as he
appeared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how portentous that truth
soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sister
Helen's absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted--it was the sole
very definite fact about hi