here
arose, besides, another question, why should this connection now cease,
by what change in condition were they to be separated, and was the
separation to be complete and final? Clara ought to have told him more;
she should have been more explicit. It was unfair to leave him with an
unsolved difficulty which a few words might have set clear. He was half
angry with her for the torture of this uncertainty, and yet--let us own
it--in his secret heart he hugged this mystery as a new interest that
attached him to life. Let a man have ever so little of the gambler in
his nature,--and we have never pictured Layton as amongst that prudent
category,--and there will be still a tendency to weigh the eventualities
of life, as chances inclining now to this side, now to that "I was lucky
in that affair," "I was unfortunate there," are expressions occasionally
heard from those who have never played a card or touched a dice-box. And
where does this same element play such a part as when a cloud of doubt
and obscurity involves the fate of one we love?

For the first few days of the voyage Layton thought of nothing but Clara
and her history, till his mind grew actually confused with conflicting
guesses about her. "I must tell Quackinboss everything. I must ask his
aid to read this mystery, or it will drive me mad," said he, at last.
"He has seen her, too, and liked her." She was the one solitary figure
he had met with at the Villa which seemed to have made a deep impression
upon him; and over and over again the American had alluded to the
"'little gal' with the long eyelashes, who sang so sweetly."

It was not very easy to catch the Colonel in an unoccupied moment.
Ever since the voyage began he was full of engagements. He was an old
Transatlantic voyager, deep in all the arts and appliances by which such
journeys are rendered agreeable. Such men turn up everywhere. On the
Cunard line they organize the whist-parties, the polka on the poop-deck,
the sweepstakes on the ship's log, and the cod-fishing on the banks. On
the overland route it is they who direct where tents are to be pitched,
kids roasted, and Arabs horsewhipped. By a sort of common accord a
degree of command is conceded to them, and their authority is admitted
without dispute. Now and then a rival will contest the crown, and by
his party divide the state; but the community is large enough for such
schism, which, after all, is rarely a serious one. The Pretender, in the
pres