It was easy enough to bring Maitland and Darrow together."My friend is himself much interested in the game; he heard of your superbground; may he be permitted to examine it closely?" Darrow was all attention.He would be delighted to show it.Suppose they make a practical test of it by playing a game.This they did and Maitland played superbly, but he was hardly a match for the old gentleman, who sought to palliate his defeat by saying: "You play an excellent game, sir; but I am a trifle too much for you on my own ground.Now, if you can spare the time, I should like to witness a game between you and my daughter; I think you will be pretty evenly matched."If he could spare the time! I laughed outright at the idea.Why, with the prospect of meeting Gwen Darrow before him, an absolute unit of measure, with a snail's pace, would have made good its escape from him.As it is a trick of poor humanity to refuse when offered the very thing one has been madly scheming to obtain, I hastened to accept Darrow's invitation for my friend, and to assure him on my own responsibility, that time was just then hanging heavily on Maitland's hands.Well, the game was played, but Maitland was so unnerved by the girl's presence that he played execrably, so poorly, indeed, that the always polite Darrow remarked: "You must charge your easy victory, Gwen, to your opponent's gallantry, not to his lack of skill, for I assure you he gave me a much harder rub." The young lady cast a quick glance at Maitland, which said so plainly that she preferred a fair field and no favour that he hastened to say: "Your father puts too high an estimate upon my play.I did my best to win, but - but I was a little nervous; I see, however, that you would have defeated me though I had been in my best form." Gwen gave him one of those short, searching looks, so peculiarly her own, which seem to read, with mathematical certainty, one's innermost thoughts, - and the poor fellow blushed to the tips of his ears.- But he was no boy, this Maitland, and betrayed no other sign of the tempest that was raging within him.His utterance remained as usual, deliberate and incisive, and I thought this perplexed the young lady.Before leaving, both Maitland and I were invited to become parties to a six-handed game to be played the following week, after the grounds had been redressed with gravel.
Maitland looked forward to this second meeting with Miss Darrow with an eagerness which made every hour seem interminably long, and hewas in such a flutter of expectancy that I was sure if"We live...in thoughts, not breaths;In feelings, not in figures on a dialWe should count time by heart-throbs,"he must have passed through a period as long as that separating the Siege of Troy from the "late unpleasantness." The afternoon came at last, however.The party consisted, besides Darrow and his daughter, Maitland and myself, of two young gentlemen with whom personally I had but a slight acquaintance, although I knew them somewhat by reputation.The younger one, Clinton Browne, is a young artist whose landscapes were beginning to attract wide attention in Boston, and the elder, Charles Herne, a Western gentleman of some literary attainments, but comparatively unknown here in the East.There is nothing about Mr.Herne that would challenge more than passing attention.If you had said of him, "He is well-fleshed, well-groomed, and intellectually well- thatched," you would have voiced the opinion of most of his acquaintances.
This somewhat elaborately upholstered old world has a deal of mere filling of one kind and another, and Mr.Herne is a part of it.To be sure, he leaves the category of excelsior very far behind and approaches very nearly to the best grade of curled hair, but, in spite of all this, he is simply a sort of social filling.
Mr.Browne, on the other hand, is a very different personage.Of medium height, closely knit, with the latent activity and grace of the cat flowing through every movement and even stagnating in his pose, he is a man that the first casual gaze instantly returns to with sharpened focus.You have seen gymnasts whose normal movements were slowly performed springs, just as rust is a slow combustion and fire the same thing in less time.Well, Clinton Browne strongly suggested that sort of athlete.Add to this a regularly formed, clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful face, with a pair of wonderfully piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black eyes, and one need not marvel that men as well as women stared at him.I have spoken of his gaze as "somewhat shifty," yet am not altogether sure that in that term I accurately describe it.What first fastened my attention was this vague, unfocussed, roving, quasi-introspective vision flashingwith panther-like suddenness into a directness that seemed to burn and pierce one like the thrust of a hot stiletto, His face was clean-shaven, save for a mere thumb-mark of black hair directly under the centre of his lower lip.This Iago-like tab and the almost fierce brilliancy of his concentrated gaze gave to his countenance at times a sinister, Machiavellian expression that was irresistible and which, to my thinking, seriously marred an otherwise fine face.Of=20course due allowance must be made for the strong prejudice I have against any form of beard.However, I'd wager a box of my best liver-pills against any landscape Browne ever painted, - I don't care if it's as big as a cyclorama, - that if he had known how completely Gwen shared my views, - how she disliked the appearance of bewhiskered men, - that delicately nurtured little imperial would soon have been reduced to a tender memory, - that is to say, if a physician can diagnose a case of love from such symptoms as devouring glances and an attentiveness so marked that it quite disgusted Maitland, who repeatedly measured his rival with the apparent cold precision of a mathematician, albeit there was warmth enough underneath.
