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Randolph Leffingwell lived long enough to be taken back to Nice, and to consign his infant daughter and sundry other unsolved problems to his brother Tom. Brother Tom or Uncle Tom, as we must call him with Honora cheerfully accepted the charge. For his legacies in life had been chiefly blessings in disguise.
"I imagine the Vicomte could make love charmingly," she said. Mr. Spence suddenly became very solemn. "Merely as a fellow-countryman, Miss Leffingwell " he began, when she sprang to her feet, her eyes dancing, and finished the sentence. "You would advise me to be on my guard against him, because, although I look twenty-five and experienced, I am only nineteen and inexperienced. Thank you."
Let us say it boldly she was like that: she had the world-old knack of sowing discord and despair in the souls of young men. She was as those who had known that fascinating gentleman were not slow to remark Randolph Leffingwell over again. During the festival seasons, Uncle Tom averred, they wore out the latch on the front gate.
Merely to take up the pen was to pass magically through marble portals into the great world itself. The Sir Charles Grandison of this novel was, needless to say, not Peter Erwin. He was none other than Mr. Randolph Leffingwell, under a very thin disguise. Two more years have gone by, limping in the summer and flying in the winter, two more years of conquests.
Leffingwell was at this period of his life forty-eight, but the habit he had acquired of assuming responsibilities and burdens seemed to have had the effect of making his age indefinite. He was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, his mustache and hair already turning; his eyebrows were a trifle bushy, and his eyes reminded men of one eternal and highly prized quality honesty. They were blue grey.
"I have always understood, Miss Leffingwell, that the king of beasts was somewhere near the shade of the jungle." Honora laughed in spite of this apparent refutation of her theory of his apparel, and shook her head. "Do be serious, Peter. You'd make much more of an impression on people if you wore clothes that had well, a little more distinction."
Carolyn inquired civilly after his condition; Amy Leffingwell, with her blue eyes intent upon him, expressed concern and sympathy; Hortense, with her lips closely shut in a satirical smile, said nothing at all: a possible exhibition of self-control which gave her aunt some measure of solicitude. It was not always well when she talked, and it was not always well when she kept silent. Mrs.
"Our Amy," replied Foster, with a dash of bitterness. "Amy Leffingwell?" asked Randolph, still more quickly. Foster had blind eyes, but alert ears. He felt that Randolph was surprised and displeased. And indeed his host was both. That boy fallen maladroitly in love? thought Randolph. It was a second check.
Honora Leffingwell is the original name of our heroine. She was born in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, at Nice, in France, and she spent the early years of her life in St. Louis, a somewhat conservative old city on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Although he had not risen above the position of paying teller, Thomas Leffingwell had a unique place in the city of his birth; and the esteem in which he was held by capitalists and clerks proves that character counts for something. On his father's failure and death he had entered the Prairie Bank, at eighteen, and never left it.
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