“Well, at first she was too young, and then she thought her family ought to see Europe—of course they could see it better _with_ her—and they spent some time there. And then Mr. Bellamy had some business difficulties that made him feel as if he didn’t want to marry just then. But he has given up business and I presume feels more free. Of course it’s rather long, but all the while they’ve been engaged. It’s a true, true love,” said Mrs. Steuben, whose sound of the adjective was that of a feeble flute. “Is his name Mr. Bellamy?” the Count asked with his haunting reminiscence. “D. F. Bellamy, so? And has he been in a store?” “I don’t know what kind of business it was: it was some kind of business in Utica. I think he had a branch in New York. He’s one of the leading gentlemen of Utica and very highly educated. He’s a good deal older than Miss Day. He’s a very fine man—I presume a college man. He stands very high in Utica. I don’t know why you look as if you doubted it.” Vogelstein assured Mrs. Steuben that he doubted nothing, and indeed what she told him was probably the more credible for seeming to him eminently strange. Bellamy had been the name of the gentleman who, a year and a half before, was to have met Pandora on the arrival of the German steamer; it was in Bellamy’s name that she had addressed herself with such effusion to Bellamy’s friend, the man in the straw hat who was about to fumble in her mother’s old clothes. This was a fact that seemed to Count Otto to finish the picture of her contradictions; it wanted at present no touch to be complete. Yet even as it hung there before him it continued to fascinate him, and he stared at it, detached from surrounding things and feeling a little as if he had been pitched out of an overturned vehicle, till the boat bumped against one of the outstanding piles of the wharf at which Mrs. Steuben’s party was to disembark. There was some delay in getting the steamer adjusted to the dock, during which the passengers watched the process over its side and extracted what entertainment they might from the appearance of the various persons collected to receive it. There were darkies and loafers and hackmen, and also vague individuals, the loosest and blankest he had ever seen anywhere, with tufts on their chins, toothpicks in their mouths, hands in their pockets, rumination in their jaws and diamond pins in their shirt-fronts, who looked as if they had sauntered over from Pennsylvania Avenue to while away half an hour, forsaking for that interval their various slanting postures in the porticoes of the hotels and the doorways of the saloons.