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Updated: May 23, 2025
To the last day of his life Victor Maurien will not forget one quiet evening, when he came to the hotel and found Theodora North by herself, in their private parlor, reading an English letter by the blaze of a candelabra. It had arrived that very day from Downport, and something in it had touched her, for when she rose to greet him, her gipsy eyes were mistily soft.
An absurdly loving, simple, impolitic young person was this Theodora of ours; but I, for one, must confess to feeling some weak sympathy for her very ignorance. Among the many of the girl's admirers whom Denis Oglethorpe envied jealously, perhaps the one most jealously envied, was Victor Maurien.
He looked worn and fatigued, she thought, and there was a new unrest in his expression. It was fully a quarter of an hour before he left Lady Throckmorton and came to her side; but when he did so, something in his face or air, perhaps, made Victor Maurien give way to his greater need in an impulse of generosity.
He was no less a personage than the attache, of whom she had written to Pamela, and his name was Victor Maurien. He had been before all the rest, and so had gained some slight footing, which he was certainly not the man to relinquish. He had gained ground with Lady Throckmorton too, and in Denis Oglethorpe's absence, had begun almost to fill his place.
She was sitting in their box in the theatre one night, half listening to Maurien, half to the singers, and wondering dreamily what was going on in Broome street at the moment, when she suddenly became conscious of a slight stir among the people in the seats on the other side of the house. She turned her face quickly, as if she had been magnetized.
I want to send Joanna and Elin something, to show them that I don't forget them at all. I think I should like to send them some pretty dresses. Joanna is fair and she always wanted a pale-blue silk. Do you think a pale-blue silk would be very expensive, M. Maurien?"
There was such danger for him, and his perilled honor, in her simple tremor and sadness, that he was forced to be silent. It was not safe to follow M. Maurien at least. But, as might be anticipated, their conversation flagged in no slight degree. The hearts of both were so full of one subject that it would have been hard to force them to another.
She answered him with a soft little gasp, of a remorseful sob. "It has brought M. Maurien," she confessed. "And sent him away again?" he added, in a low, unsteady voice. She nodded; her simple, pathetic sorrowfulness showing itself even in the poor little gesture. "He has been very fond of me for a long time," she said, tremulously. "He says that he loves me. He came to ask me to be his wife.
"M. Maurien is the very man to take good care of her; and besides that, he is, of course, desirable. Girls like Theo ought to marry young. Marriage is their forte; they are too dependent to be left to themselves. Theo is not like Pamela or your Priscilla Gower, for instance; queenly as Theo looks, she is the veriest strengthless baby on earth.
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