Flickerbridge

CHAPTER I

Frank Granger had arrived from Paris to paint a portrait--an order
given him, as a young compatriot with a future, whose early work
would some day have a price, by a lady from New York, a friend of
his own people and also, as it happened, of Addie's, the young
woman to whom it was publicly both affirmed and denied that he was
engaged. Other young women in Paris--fellow-members there of the
little tight transpontine world of art-study--professed to know
that the pair had "several times" over renewed their fond
understanding. This, however, was their own affair; the last phase
of the relation, the last time of the times, had passed into
vagueness; there was perhaps even an impression that if they were
inscrutable to their friends they were not wholly crystalline to
each other and themselves. What had occurred for Granger at all
events in connexion with the portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his
intending model, whose return to America was at hand, had suddenly
been called to London by her husband, occupied there with pressing
business, but had yet desired that her displacement should not
interrupt her sittings. The young man, at her request, had
followed her to England and profited by all she could give him,
making shift with a small studio lent him by a London painter whom
he had known and liked a few years before in the French atelier
that then cradled, and that continued to cradle, so many of their
kind.

The British capital was a strange grey world to him, where people
walked, in more ways than one, by a dim light; but he was happily
of such a turn that the impression, just as it came, could nowhere
ever fail him, and even the worst of these things was almost as
much an occupation--putting it only at that--as the best. Mrs.
Bracken moreover passed him on, and while the darkness ebbed a
little in the April days he found himself consolingly committed to
a couple of fresh subjects. This cut him out work for more than
another month, but meanwhile, as he said, he saw a lot--a lot that,
with frequency and with much expression, he wrote about to Addie.
She also wrote to her absent friend, but in briefer snatches, a
meagreness to her reasons for which he had long since assented.
She had other play for her pen as well as, fortunately, other
remuneration; a regular correspondence for a "prominent Boston
paper," fitful connexions with public sheets perhaps also in cases
fitful, and a mind above all engrossed at times, to the exclusion
of everything else, with the study of the short story. This last
was what she had mainly come out to go into, two or three years
after he had found himself engulfed in the mystery of Carolus. She
was indeed, on her own deep sea, more