But he only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who had come to seek her fortune, reflected that it would certainly be well for her if the persons against whom she might need to measure herself should all be mere little girls.
The sunset was superb; they stopped to look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous mixture of colors.
The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood there she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a distinguished, strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street corner in the French tongue, could not be an object of indifference.
Eugenia's spirits rose. She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gayety. If she had come to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to find.
There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the passers of a certain natural facility in things.
"You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?" asked Felix.
"Not to-morrow," said the Baroness.
"Nor write to the Reigning Prince?"
"I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over here."
"He will not believe you," said the young man. "I advise you to let him alone."
Felix himself continued to be in high good humor.
Brought up among ancient customs and in picturesque cities, he yet found plenty of local color in the little Puritan metropolis.
That evening, after dinner, he told his sister that he should go forth early on the morrow to look up their cousins.
"You are very impatient," said Eugenia.
"What can be more natural," he asked, "after seeing all those pretty girls to-day? If one's cousins are of that pattern, the sooner one knows them the better."
"Perhaps they are not," said Eugenia. "We ought to have brought some letters--to some other people."
"The other people would not be our kinsfolk."
"Possibly they would be none the worse for that," the Baroness replied.
Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted.
"That was not what you said when you first proposed to me that we should come out here and fraternize with our relatives.
You said that it was the prompting of natural affection; and when I suggested some reasons against it you declared that the voix du sang should go before everything."
"You remember all that?" asked the Baroness.
"Vividly! I was greatly moved by it."
She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the morning; she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother. She apparently was going to say something, but she checked herself and resumed her walk.
Then, in a few moments, she said something different, which had the effect of an explanation of the suppression of her earlier thought.
"You will never be anything but a child, dear brother."
"One would suppose that you, madam," answered Felix, laughing, "were a thousand years old."
"I am--sometimes," said the Baroness.
"I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a personage so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you their respects."
Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped before her brother, laying her hand upon his arm.
"They are not to come and see me," she said. "You are not to allow that. That is not the way I shall meet them first."
And in answer to his interrogative glance she went on.
"You will go and examine, and report. You will come back and tell me who they are and what they are; their number, gender, their respective ages--all about them.
Be sure you observe everything; be ready to describe to me the locality, the accessories--how shall I say it?--the mise en scene. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them.
I will present myself--I will appear before them!" said the Baroness, this time phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.
"And what message am I to take to them?" asked Felix, who had a lively faith in the justness of his sister's arrangements.
She looked at him a moment--at his expression of agreeable veracity; and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, "Say what you please.
Tell my story in the way that seems to you most--natural." And she bent her forehead for him to kiss.