“Kid, you know nothing about love. A man truly in love may have been attracted by beauty, but it is not that which holds him. It is a unity of soul; he finds a complement of mind; he has a sense of sympathy and, through thick and thin, a partisan, constant faith in a reciprocal heart. He gets used to the prettiest face and it makes little impression on him,--just as he wouldn’t notice, after a time, a fine costume. She is nothing that I imagined. She is not now, and she never was the ideal I loved. I don’t regret her. Don’t grieve for me, little boy. And now will you be so kind as to take those paws off my neck,--you are half strangling me with your fraternal anxiety. Behold, I will smite you under the fifth rib.”
There was once more a brief, boyish scuffle. Then the two turned and came walking decorously back to the group on the portico. The exterior aspect of the old ruin had an added majesty by daylight, despite the more obvious injuries of wreckage. Its fine proportions, the blended elegance and stateliness of its design, the richness even in the restraint of its ornamentation, all showed with telling effect, apart from the wild work within of the marauders. These details the rude usage it had received could not affect. It might have stood as an imposing architectural example of a princely residence of the date of its erection, and it was impossible to gaze upon it with a sense of possessing it, and feel no glow of gratulation.
“Why, the item of glass alone would be a corker,” a practical man was saying, walking backward down the stone pavement and surveying the great black gaps of the shattered windows.
The two brothers cast a meaning glance at each other, the discussion, of which this was obviously a fragment, evidently looked to a rehabilitation of the mansion under a change of owners, for, certainly, it would seem that Floyd-Rosney had neither the interest nor the associations to induce him to set up his staff of rest here. It was only a straw, but it showed how the wind of opinion set, and the brothers were in the frame of mind to discern propitious omens. The sun was bright on the over-grown spaces of the lawn. The Cherokee rose hedge that divided it from the family graveyard, and continued much further, had spread with its myriad unpruned sprangles beyond the space designed for a boundary, growing many feet wide. Beneath the great arch it described stretched a long tunnel-like arbor, throughout its whole extent, dark, mystic, in the shadow of its evergreen leaves. By reason of some natural attraction which quaint nooks have for children, Marjorie and little Ned had discovered this strange passageway, and were running in and out of the darksome space, with their shrilly sweet cries of pretended fright and real excitement, each time venturing a little farther than before. The mists had lifted from the river, which spread a broad, rippling surface of burnished copper in the sunshine under an azure sky. There was no sign of approaching craft, no curl of smoke above the woods beyond the point to herald deliverance by a steamboat. One of the old ladies had established herself on her suitcase on the topmost step of the flight from the portico, and it would, indeed, have been a swift steamer that could have escaped her vigilance and passed without being signaled.