Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE PATH OF IN-THE-SPRING The case of Hobart Eddy had always interested us,—dear Hobart Eddy with whom matters stood like this: Heaven had manifestly intended him to be a Young Husband, and yet he was thirty-five and walked the world alone. Pelleas and I were wont to talk of him before our drawing-room fire. Hobart Eddy, we were agreed, was one of the men who look like a young husband. By that I cannot in the least explain what I mean, but he was wont to bend above a book or lean toward a picture exactly as another man would say: "And how are you to-day, dear ?" If he were to have entered a coach in which I was traveling I think that I should involuntarily have looked about for some girlish face to be lighting at his coming. Therefore we two had been wont to amuse ourselves by picturing, but without much hope, his possible wife; she must be so many things to him that we found it difficult to select any one in whom to rest our expectation, faint yet persistent. Though I knew no one save Pelleas himself who would have been as a loverso adorable, as a husband so tender, the problem was not quite so simple; for Hobart Eddy was a king of the social hour and a ruler of many. "The allegro, quite the allegro of my dinner symphony," Miss Willie Lillieblade had once thankfully flattered him. "Ah, you were more. You were the absolute conductor. You were the salvation of our tempo during the entree. The dear Bishop, who thought he was the religious theme for the trombones, how you quieted his ecclesiastical chantings. How you modulated the sputterings of that French horn of a count. And ah, my dear Hobart, how you obeyed my anxious sforzando over my mute little guest of honour. I've no beaux yeux to look you thanks, but I appreciated every breath of your baton." Thus, with ...