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It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried down-town, and decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed. It seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton. After all, it was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be final.
He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch him. "Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much gloom that it made her laugh. "If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not." "No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?"
She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them, without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps. She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art? Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so.
"Ah'm a great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say." They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were sitting when the Woodburns rang: Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.
She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her niece's guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the Leightons till she went to call upon them.
He learned that they left one daughter, who had resided for some time in the family of the Leightons, as governess; but had left Philadelphia three years since. He next sought out the Leightons, hoping to learn my residence; but they of course could give him no information upon the subject. They directed him to Mrs.
I was following Cyril at some little distance, but as he stopped to speak to her the movement of the crowd placed me just behind them. "Will you be at Leightons' to-morrow?" I heard him ask her in a low tone. "Yes," she answered, "and I wish you wouldn't come." "Why not?" "Because you're a fool, and you bore me."
Barnaby understand how it is in town." "Yes," said Beaton. He stirred his tea, while inwardly he tried to believe that he had really discouraged the Leightons from coming to New York. Perhaps the vexation of his failure made him call Mrs. Horn in his heart a fraud. "Yes," she went on, "it is very, very hard.
"But you always were a punctilious cuss. Well!" Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whom he knew came in, and he yielded to the threefold impulse of conscience, of curiosity, of inclination, in going to call at the Leightons'. He asked for the ladies, and the maid showed him into the parlor, where he found Mrs. Leighton and Miss Woodburn.
In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons, Beaton could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him. She played at having forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few months before she had been very mindful of him.
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