“Ah, what a horrid future!” cried Blanche, with a little petulant cry. “I want to be happy, but I certainly don’t want to be dull. If you say that again you will make me repent of having married the best fellow in the world. I mean to be happy, but I certainly shall not be dull if I can help it.” “I was wrong to say that,” said Bernard, “because, after all, my dear young lady, there must be an excitement in having so kind a husband as you have got. Gordon’s devotion is quite capable of taking a new form--of inventing a new kindness--every day in the year.” Blanche looked at him an instant, with less than her usual consciousness of her momentary pose. “My husband is very kind,” she said gently. She had hardly spoken the words when Gordon came in. He stopped a moment on seeing Bernard, glanced at his wife, blushed, flushed, and with a loud, frank exclamation of pleasure, grasped his friend by both hands. It was so long since he had seen Bernard that he seemed a good deal moved; he stood there smiling, clasping his hands, looking him in the eyes, unable for some moments to speak. Bernard, on his side, was greatly pleased; it was delightful to him to look into Gordon’s honest face again and to return his manly grasp. And he looked well--he looked happy; to see that was more delightful yet. During these few instants, while they exchanged a silent pledge of renewed friendship, Bernard’s elastic perception embraced several things besides the consciousness of his own pleasure. He saw that Gordon looked well and happy, but that he looked older, too, and more serious, more marked by life. He looked as if something had happened to him--as, in fact, something had. Bernard saw a latent spark in his friend’s eye that seemed to question his own for an impression of Blanche--to question it eagerly, and yet to deprecate judgment. He saw, too--with the fact made more vivid by Gordon’s standing there beside her in his manly sincerity and throwing it into contrast--that Blanche was the same little posturing coquette of a Blanche whom, at Baden, he would have treated it as a broad joke that Gordon Wright should dream of marrying. He saw, in a word, that it was what it had first struck him as being--an incongruous union. All this was a good deal for Bernard to see in the course of half a minute, especially through the rather opaque medium of a feeling of irreflective joy; and his impressions at this moment have a value only in so far as they were destined to be confirmed by larger opportunity. “You have come a little sooner than we expected,” said Gordon; “but you are all the more welcome.” “It was rather a risk,” Blanche observed. “One should be notified, when one wishes to make a good impression.” “Ah, my dear lady,” said Bernard, “you made your impression--as far as I am concerned--a long time ago, and I doubt whether it would have gained anything to-day by your having prepared an effect.”