Mrs. Dinks had informed Hope that she was going home. That lady was satisfied, by her conversation with Mrs. Newt, that it would be useless for her to see Mr. Newt--that it was one of the cases in which facts and events plead much more persuasively than words. She was sure the rich merchant would not allow his daughter to suffer. Fathers do so in novels, thought she. Of course they do, for it is necessary to the interest of the story. And old Van Boozenberg does in life, thought she. Of course he does. But he is an illiterate, vulgar, hard old brute. Mr. Newt is of another kind. She had herself read his name as director of at least seven different associations for doing good to men and women. But Mrs. Dinks still delayed her departure. She knew that there was no reason for her staying, but she staid. She loved her son dearly. She was unwilling to leave him while his future was so dismally uncertain; and every week she informed Hope that she was on the point of going. Hope Wayne was not sorry to remain. Perhaps she also had her purposes. At Saratoga, in the previous summer, Arthur Merlin had remarked her incessant restlessness, and had connected it with the picture and the likeness of somebody. But when afterward, in New York, he cleared up the mystery and resolved who the somebody was, to his great surprise he observed, at the same time, that the restlessness of Hope Wayne was gone. From the months of seclusion which she had imposed upon herself he saw that she emerged older, calmer, and lovelier than he had ever seen her. The calmness was, indeed, a little unnatural. To his sensitive eye--for, as he said to Lawrence Newt, in explanation of his close observation, it is wonderful how sensitive an exclusive devotion to art will make the eye--to his eye the calmness was still too calm, as the gayety had been too gay. In the solitude of his studio, as he drew many pictures upon the canvas, and sang, and smoked, and scuffled across the floor to survey his work from a little distance--and studied its progress through his open fist--or as he lay sprawling upon his lounge in a cotton velvet Italian coat, inimitably befogged and bebuttoned--and puffed profusely, following the intervolving smoke with his eye--his meditations were always the same. He was always thinking of Hope Wayne, and befooling himself with the mask of art, actually hiding himself from himself: and not perceiving that when a man's sole thought by day and night is a certain woman, and an endless speculation about the quality of her feeling for another man, he is simply a lover thinking of his mistress and a rival.