"Even granting that," she replied, "the career was the man's, after all, and the fame and visible reward. A man will sometimes say, 'I owe all my success to my wife, or my mother, or sister,' but he never really believes it, nor, in fact, does any one else. It is _his_ success, after all, and the influence of the woman is but a circ.u.mstance, real and powerful though it may be. I am not sure," she added, "that woman's influence, so called, isn't rather an overrated thing. Women like to feel that they have it, and men, in matters which they hold lightly, flatter them by yielding, but I am doubtful if a man ever arrives at or abandons a settled course or conviction through the influence of a woman, however exerted."

"I think you are wrong," said John, "and I feel sure of so much as this: that a man might often be or do for a woman's sake that which he would not for its sake or his own."

"That is quite another thing," she said. "There is in it no question of influence; it is one of impulse and motive."

"I have told you to-night," said John, "that what you said to me had influenced me greatly."

"Pardon me," she replied, "you employed a figure which exactly defined your condition. You said I supplied the drop which caused the solution to crystallize--that is, to elaborate your ill.u.s.tration, that it was already at the point of saturation with your own convictions and intentions."

"I said also," he urged, "that you had set the time for me. Is the idea unpleasant to you?" he asked after a moment, while he watched her face.

She did not at once reply, but presently she turned to him with slightly heightened color and said, ignoring his question:

"Would you rather think that you had done what you thought right because you so thought, or because some one else wished to have you? Or, I should say, would you rather think that the right suggestion was another's than your own?"

He laughed a little, and said evasively: "You ought to be a lawyer, Miss Blake. I should hate to have you cross-examine me unless I were very sure of my evidence."

She gave a little shrug of her shoulders in reply as she turned and resumed her embroidery. They talked for a while longer, but of other things, the discussion of woman's influence having been dropped by mutual consent.

After John's departure she suspended operations on the doily, and sat for a while gazing reflectively into the fire. She was a person as frank with herself as with others, and with as little vanity as was compatible with being human, which is to say that, though she was not without it, it was of the sort which could be gratified but not flattered--in fact, the sort which flattery wounds rather than pleases. But despite her apparent skepticism she had not been displeased by John's a.s.sertion that she had influenced him in his course. She had expressed herself truly, believing that he would have done as he had without her intervention; but she thought that he was sincere, and it was pleasant to her to have him think as he did.

Considering the surroundings and conditions under which she had lived, she had had her share of the acquaintance and attentions of agreeable men, but none of them had ever got with her beyond the stage of mere friendliness. There had never been one whose coming she had particularly looked forward to, or whose going she had deplored. She had thought of marriage as something she might come to, but she had promised herself that it should be on such conditions as were, she was aware, quite improbable of ever being fulfilled. She would not care for a man because he was clever and distinguished, but she felt that he must be those things, and to have, besides, those qualities of character and person which should attract her. She had known a good many men who were clever and to some extent distinguished, but none who had attracted her personally. John Lenox did not strike her as being particularly clever, and he certainly was not distinguished, nor, she thought, ever very likely to be; but she had had a pleasure in being with him which she had never experienced in the society of any other man, and underneath some boyish ways she divined a strength and steadfastness which could be relied upon at need. And she admitted to herself that during the ten days since her return, though she had unsparingly snubbed her sister's wonderings why he did not call, she had speculated a good deal upon the subject herself, with a sort of resentful feeling against both herself and him that she should care--

Her face flushed as she recalled the momentary pressure of his hand upon hers on that last night on deck. She rang for the servant, and went up to her room.

CHAPTER IX.

It is not the purpose of this narrative to dwell minutely upon the events of the next few months. Truth to say, they were devoid of incidents of sufficient moment in themselves to warrant chronicle. What they led up to was memorable enough.

As time went on John found himself on terms of growing intimacy with the Carling household, and eventually it came about that if there pa.s.sed a day when their door did not open to him it was _dies non_.

Mr. Carling was ostensibly more responsible than the ladies for the frequency of our friend's visits, and grew to look forward to them. In fact, he seemed to regard them as paid primarily to himself, and ignored an occasional suggestion on his wife's part that it might not be wholly the pleasure of a chat and a game at cards with him that brought the young man so often to the house. And when once she ventured to concern him with some stirrings of her mind on the subject, he rather testily (for him) pooh-poohed her misgivings, remarking that Mary was her own mistress, and, so far as he had ever seen, remarkably well qualified to regulate her own affairs. Had she ever seen anything to lead her to suppose that there was any particular sentiment existing between Lenox and her sister?

"No," said Mrs. Carling, "perhaps not exactly, but you know how those things go, and he always stays after we come up when she is at home." To which her husband vouchsafed no reply, but began a protracted wavering as to the advisability of leaving the steam on or turning it off for the night, which was a cold one--a dilemma which, involving his personal welfare or comfort at the moment, permitted no consideration of other matters to share his mind.

Mrs. Carling had not spoken to her sister upon the subject. She thought that that young woman, if she were not, as Mr. Carling said, "remarkably well qualified to regulate her own affairs," at least held the opinion that she was, very strongly.

The two were devotedly fond of each other, but Mrs. Carling was the elder by twenty years, and in her love was an element of maternal solicitude to which her sister, while giving love for love in fullest measure, did not fully respond. The elder would have liked to share every thought, but she was neither so strong nor so clever as the girl to whom she had been almost as a mother, and who, though perfectly truthful and frank when she was minded to express herself, gave, as a rule, little satisfaction to attempts to explore her mind, and on some subjects was capable of meeting such attempts with impatience, not to say resentment--a fact of which her sister was quite aware. But as time went on, and the frequency of John's visits and attentions grew into a settled habit, Mrs. Carling's uneasiness, with which perhaps was mingled a bit of curiosity, got the better of her reserve, and she determined to get what satisfaction could be obtained for it.

They were sitting in Mrs. Carling's room, which was over the drawing-room in the front of the house. A fire of cannel blazed in the grate.

A furious storm was whirling outside. Mrs. Carling was occupied with some sort of needlework, and her sister, with a writing pad on her lap, was composing a letter to a friend with whom she carried on a desultory and rather one-sided correspondence. Presently she yawned slightly, and, putting down her pad, went over to the window and looked out.

"What a day!" she exclaimed. "It seems to get worse and worse.

Positively you can't see across the street. It's like a western blizzard."

"It is, really," said Mrs. Carling; and then, moved by the current of thought which had been pa.s.sing in her mind of late, "I fancy we shall spend the evening by ourselves to-night."

"That would not be so unusual as to be extraordinary, would it?" said Mary.

"Wouldn't it?" suggested Mrs. Carling in a tone that was meant to be slightly quizzical.

"We are by ourselves most evenings, are we not?" responded her sister, without turning around. "Why do you particularize to-night?"

"I was thinking," answered Mrs. Carling, bending a little closer over her work, "that even Mr. Lenox would hardly venture out in such a storm unless it were absolutely necessary."

"Oh, yes, to be sure, Mr. Lenox; very likely not," was Miss Blake's comment, in a tone of indifferent recollection.

"He comes here very often, almost every night, in fact," remarked Mrs.

Carling, looking up sideways at her sister's back.

"Now that you mention it," said Mary dryly, "I have noticed something of the sort myself."

"Do you think he ought to?" asked her sister, after a moment of silence.

"Why not?" said the girl, turning to her questioner for the first time.

"And why should I think he should or should not? Doesn't he come to see Julius, and on Julius's invitation? I have never asked him--but once,"

she said, flushing a little as she recalled the occasion and the wording of the invitation.

"Do you think," returned Mrs. Carling, "that his visits are wholly on Julius's account, and that he would come so often if there were no other inducement? You know," she continued, pressing her point timidly but persistently, "he always stays after we go upstairs if you are at home, and I have noticed that when you are out he always goes before our time for retiring."

"I should say," was the rejoinder, "that that was very much the proper thing. Whether or not he comes here too often is not for me to say--I have no opinion on the subject. But, to do him justice, he is about the last man to wait for a tacit dismissal, or to cause you and Julius to depart from what he knows to be your regular habit out of politeness to him. He is a person of too much delicacy and good breeding to stay when--if--that is to say--" She turned again to the window without completing her sentence, and, though Mrs. Carling thought she could complete it for her, she wisely forbore. After a moment of silence, Mary said in a voice devoid of any traces of confusion:

"You asked me if I thought Mr. Lenox would come so often if there were no object in his coming except to see Julius. I can only say that if Julius were out of the question I think he would come here but seldom; but," she added, as she left the window and resumed her seat, "I do not quite see the object of this discussion, and, indeed, I am not quite sure of what we are discussing. Do you object," she asked, looking curiously at her sister and smiling slightly, "to Mr. Lenox's coming here as he does, and if so, why?" This was apparently more direct than Mrs. Carling was quite prepared for. "And if you do," Mary proceeded, "what is to be done about it? Am I to make him understand that it is not considered the proper thing? or will you? or shall we leave it to Julius?"

Mrs. Carling looked up into her sister's face, in which was a smile of amused penetration, and looked down again in visible embarra.s.sment.

The young woman laughed as she shook her finger at her.

"Oh, you transparent goose!" she cried. "What did he say?"

"What did who say?" was the evasive response.

"Julius," said Mary, putting her finger under her sister's chin and raising her face. "Tell me now. You've been talking with him, and I insist upon knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So there!"

"Well," she admitted hesitatingly, "I said to him something like what I have to you, that it seemed to me that Mr. Lenox came very often, and that I did not believe it was all on his account, and that he" (won't somebody please invent another p.r.o.noun?) "always stayed when you were at home--"

"--and," broke in her sister, "that you were afraid my young affections were being engaged, and that, after all, we didn't know much if anything about the young man, or, perhaps, that he was forming a hopeless attachment, and so on."

"No," said Mrs. Carling, "I didn't say that exactly. I--"

"Didn't you, really?" said Mary teasingly. "One ought to be explicit in such cases, don't you think? Well, what did Julius say? Was he very much concerned?" Mrs. Carling's face colored faintly under her sister's raillery, and she gave a little embarra.s.sed laugh.