an affianced
bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little
incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not
give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return
a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely
happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he
abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in
consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was
almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went
to Boston to embark.

"For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your
own sake."

"I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply
sorry to be going."

"That 's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you
mean you are simply glad!"

Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over
there," he said.

"I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than
America."

Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the
only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits
interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the
occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were
imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife
sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence
upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the
elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had
propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant
figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was
present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gayety confessed to no
change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gayety of her own,
mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her
earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it;
and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice
young girl.

The End

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