Upon this point Florence was, silently, in accord with Mrs. Fitz Hugh. She could see—from Mrs. Budd’s point of view that every eligible man not only should, but sooner or later would, marry some suitable girl—how the proposition was a reasonable one. But she felt there was as slight a possibility of Charlie Thair’s being unseated from his bachelor state as from his hunting-saddle.
“Was there”—it was the following thought—“such a scant possibility of Fox Longacre?”
She turned from her vis-à-vis to the window, as the train, with a roar and a swing, rushed into the cañon, and fixed her eyes on the dizzy fascination of the whirling river below.
The stream of events of the last five years was more rapid and intricate to the vision of her mind. The first light ripple on this stream was her clear memory of the charming, inconsequent American boy whom she had met in Vienna five years before. It had been on one of her trips, that were always solitary, since Captain Essington was too busy spending her neat little fortune in various very private and proper gambling-clubs to care how his wife amused herself.
How this boy, Fox Longacre, with his facile Gallic Americanism, had stood out among the miscellaneous lot of students of the Vienna Conservatory! She remembered his passionate enthusiasm for the music that he whimsically called his “trade,” his spasmodic application.
They had got on famously in their short, merry acquaintance.
She had felt it the greatest pity in the world that he should be an orphan, a waif, with just enough money to let him be comfortably idle, and such potentialities of power running riot.
She had regretted the end of that gay little friendship when she returned to her sad-colored London.
Between this first encounter and the next intervened her catastrophe. Something done in those private and particular gambling-houses—something that never clearly came out of them—swallowed the half of the money remaining, and directed the shot that ended Captain Essington’s life. A grim, a bitter wrench it had been! The mere memory of it brought back the ghost of the old ache. She had realized then what depths of suffering might be, in which love and bereavement bore no part. Even the relief of freedom had been overwhelmed in the shock of violent death, of disorganized existence.