Atkins had taken up his abode in B. for the winter; but Alison had left a few days after Frederic's burial. He must have felt that his presence was not comforting to Jane; so he resumed his original plan of travel. He had passed the autumn and winter in a tour through Switzerland and Italy, and now, in the spring, when he had visited the larger cities of Germany, he was about to return to B. The doctor and his wife even now knew nothing of his relations to their niece. Jane had never alluded to the subject. They only knew that the year of her stay in Germany having expired, and its purpose having been accomplished, she was soon to return to America; that the first of the next month had been fixed upon as the time of her departure. It was delegated to Atkins to inform the relatives that Jane would return as Mrs. Alison, and that it was thought best the marriage ceremony should be performed here in the house of her uncle. The great respect and deference they had always shown the young lady's wealth, now found its reward; they were treated as if really inferiors, not being informed of this most intimate of family relations, until their aid was needed in arranging the necessary preliminaries for the marriage decided upon so long ago.
Alison had arrived at Atkins' hotel, and would remain there for the present; but his manner today betrayed nothing of that passionately concealed impatience, which, upon his former arrival in B., had driven him at once to Jane, and subjected him to Atkins' ridicule. He now stood nonchalanty at a window, and gazed indifferently down into the street, as if in no haste at all for the approaching reunion.
Alison at this moment seemed quite another being than on that night when unfettered passion had carried him beyond all bounds. In the last six months he had found ample time to recover his equanimity, and he had perfectly succeeded in the effort. He was again the calm, formal man of business with the cold, calculating glance and the conventional polish. That which lay dormant under all this, and had once so dangerously come to the surface, had now sunken back into the depths. His face looked as if it had never known an emotion, only one trait remained; that expression of inimical hardness and cool determination which had first appeared at that meeting in S.; it was yet in his face; it stood firmly engraven there as if during those six months it had not for an instant left his features.