rlin, and
shortly afterward to America, so that they were on opposite sides of the
globe. Before he returned to his own country, Bernard made by letter two
or three offers to join him in Europe, anywhere that was agreeable to
him. Gordon answered that his movements were very uncertain, and that he
should be sorry to trouble Bernard to follow him about. He had put him
to this inconvenience in making him travel from Venice to Baden, and
one such favor at a time was enough to ask, even of the most obliging of
men. Bernard was, of course, afraid that what he had told Gordon about
Angela Vivian was really the cause of a state of things which, as
between two such good friends, wore a perceptible resemblance to
alienation. Gordon had given her up; but he bore Bernard a grudge for
speaking ill of her, and so long as this disagreeable impression should
last, he preferred not to see him. Bernard was frank enough to charge
the poor fellow with a lingering rancor, of which he made, indeed, no
great crime. But Gordon denied the allegation, and assured him that,
to his own perception, there was no decline in their intimacy. He only
requested, as a favor and as a tribute to "just susceptibilities,"
that Bernard would allude no more either to Miss Vivian or to what had
happened at Baden. This request was easy to comply with, and Bernard, in
writing, strictly conformed to it; but it seemed to him that the act of
doing so was in itself a cooling-off. What would be a better proof of
what is called a "tension" than an agreement to avoid a natural topic?
Bernard moralized a little over Gordon's "just susceptibilities," and
felt that the existence of a perverse resentment in so honest a nature
was a fact gained to his acquaintance with psychological science. It
cannot be said, however, that he suffered this fact to occupy at all
times the foreground of his consciousness. Bernard was like some great
painters; his foregrounds were very happily arranged. He heard nothing
of Mrs. Vivian and her daughter, beyond a rumor that they had gone to
Italy; and he learned, on apparently good authority, that Blanche Evers
had returned to New York with her mother. He wondered whether Captain
Lovelock was still in pawn at the Hotel de Hollande. If he did not allow
himself to wonder too curiously whether he had done a harm to Gordon,
it may be affirmed that he was haunted by the recurrence of that other
question, of which mention has already been made. Had he d