The next Sunday, about sunset, as he and John were returning from a long walk in the country, two figures came out of a small church on Sixth Avenue, well known for the excellence of its music. Miss Thomas was one, the other John recognized as Ten Eyck. She did not seem to see them, but the two walked rapidly ahead of them the length of the block, and then turned down a side street. Vane pretended to be wholly unconscious of the scene. John alone gave a grunt of surprise. And for two weeks or more Vane treated Miss Thomas with alternate neglect and familiarity when he met her in society; the former when he found it possible to avoid her, the latter when he was necessarily thrown with her. One night at a german she gave him a favor. Vane, after dancing with her, felt obliged, in common politeness, to talk with her for a few moments. He sought refuge in that sort of clumsy pleasantry which our English models have taught us to call chaff; she said nothing, but looked at him wonderingly, with large troubled eyes. She seemed as if grieved at his manner and too proud to reproach him with it. Could she really love the man? thought Vane. How could she? He felt as if the suspicion did her an injury. Vane's heart melted to her as he came home that night. He had mentally judged her as he would have judged a woman in one of his cynical French comedies. He had treated her like a character in a seventeenth century memoir. And how much above such judgment was this sweet American girl! She was fond of her friends, and true to them, and frank to him, so that he saw that she cared for him. What did she know of the world, or of older societies, or the women in his wicked French memoirs? She lived in new, pure, honest America; not in the chronicles of the _Œil-de-bœuf_. And Vane felt that the best amends he could make was to ask her to become his wife. When he hinted this intention to Haviland that philosopher, for the first and only time in his life, improvised a couplet: "Jamais la femme ne varie, Bien fol est toujours qui s'y fie." Having got off this gâtha, John retired to his pipe, and became, like a Hindoo god, impassive, ugly, and impenetrable. X.