Confidence

It was not till our hero reached Paris, on his return from the distant East, that the rumor I have just mentioned acquired an appreciable consistency. Here, indeed, it took the...

This statement was very effective, but it might well have seemed at first to do more credit to her satiric powers than to her faculty of observation. This was the light in which...

At the same moment the door was thrown open, and Mrs. Gordon appeared on the threshold with a gentleman behind her. Blanche stood an instant looking into the lighted room and he...

I have called it a stale expedient on Bernard Longueville’s part to “go to Europe” again, like the most commonplace American; and it is certain that, as our young man stood and...

Yes, he was conscious--he was very conscious; so Bernard reflected during the two or three first days of his visit to his friend. Gordon knew it must seem strange to so irrevere...

This observation struck Bernard as extremely ingenious and worthy of his mistress’s fine intelligence; he greeted it with enthusiasm, and thought of it for the next twelve hours...

He had not specified, in writing to Gordon Wright, the day on which he should arrive at Baden-Baden; it must be confessed that he was not addicted to specifying days. He came to...

And he had them in fact. He called the next day at the same hour, and he found the mother and the daughter together in their pretty salon. Angela was very gentle and gracious; h...

It was in the early days of April; Bernard Longueville had been spending the winter in Rome. He had travelled northward with the consciousness of several social duties that appe...

Bernard sat thinking for a long time; at first with a good deal of mortification--at last with a good deal of bitterness. He felt angry at last; but he was not angry with himsel...

It filled him with a kind of awe, and the feeling was by no means agreeable. It was not a feeling to which even a man of Bernard Longueville’s easy power of extracting the savou...

Bernard prepared for Gordon’s arrival in Paris, which, according to his letter, would take place in a few days. He was not intending to stop in England; Blanche desired to proce...

It had seemed to him a good idea to interrogate Mrs. Vivian; but there are a great many good ideas that are never put into execution. As he approached her with a smile and a sal...

Now that Gordon was gone, at any rate, gone for good, and not to return, he felt a sudden and singular sense of freedom. It was a feeling of unbounded expansion, quite out of pr...

It was affirmed at an early stage of this narrative that he was a young man of a contemplative and speculative turn, and he had perhaps never been more true to his character tha...

It was at the hotel, in Gordon’s apartment, late in the afternoon. A heavy thunder-storm had broken over the place an hour before, and Bernard had been standing at one of his fr...

For the three or four days that followed Gordon Wright’s departure, Bernard saw nothing of the ladies who had been committed to his charge. They chose to remain in seclusion, an...

“For a little exercise and a good deal of talk, it ‘s the pleasantest place,” said Gordon. “I have a good deal to say; I have a good deal to ask you.”

He forbore to ask her his question again--she might tell him at her convenience. But the days passed by, and she never told him--she had her own reasons. Bernard talked with her...

Some three evenings after he received this last report of the progress of affairs in Paris, Bernard, upon whom the burden of exile sat none the more lightly as the days went on,...

Bernard walked beside her, and for some moments nothing was said between them. As the silence continued, he became aware of it, and it vexed him that she should leave certain th...

Two months later Bernard Longueville was at Venice, still under the impression that he was leaving Italy. He was not a man who made plans and held to them. He made them, indeed-...

Bernard talked of this matter rather theoretically, inasmuch as to his own sense, he was in a state neither of incipient nor of absorbed fascination. He got on very easily, howe...

But on the following evening, Bernard again found himself seated in friendly colloquy with this interesting girl, while Gordon Wright discoursed with her mother on one side, and...

“Monsieur has put some time to it!” the young woman answered dryly. And she informed him that Madame was at home, though Mademoiselle, for whom he had not asked, was not.

That evening, in the gardens of the Kursaal, he renewed acquaintance with Angela Vivian. Her mother came, as usual, to sit and listen to the music, accompanied by Blanche Evers,...

“Which of them is it?” asked Longueville of his friend, after they had bidden good-night to the three ladies and to Captain Lovelock, who went off to begin, as he said, the even...

Life at Baden-Baden proved a very sociable affair, and Bernard Longueville perceived that he should not lack opportunity for the exercise of those gifts of intelligence to which...

More than a fortnight had elapsed, but Gordon Wright had not re-appeared, and Bernard suddenly decided that he would leave Baden. He found Mrs. Vivian and her daughter, very opp...

Bernard left then and went to California; but when he arrived there he asked himself why he had come, and was unable to mention any other reason than that he had announced it. H...

“May you never play a less becoming one!” cried Longueville. “I hope that your mother, at least, will accept a memento of the occasion.” And he turned again with his sketch to h...