“DORRANCE!” repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the leading incidents of her brother's wooing. “She lives near Boston, you say, and her mother is a widow?”

“Yes. What have you ever heard about her?”

“Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name—but very foolishly! I once knew a family of Dorrances—New Yorkers—but the father, a retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were married. The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older than you judge the original of the miniature to be.”

“She is not more than twenty-two, at the most,” Mabel was sure.

Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not “quiescent.” The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.

“There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then? or something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have been relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a common one to my ears.”

“Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition. I should be very sorry—”

He stopped.

Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness.

“Was not the family respectable?”

“Perfectly, my shrewd little catechist!” seeming to shake off an uncomfortable incubus, as he laughed down at her serious face. “They vaunted themselves upon the antiquity of their line, and were more liberal in allusions to departed grandeur than was quite well-bred. When I knew them they were not wealthy, or in what they would have called 'society.' Indeed, the mother kept a private boarding-house near the law-school I attended. There were several sons—very decent, enterprising fellows. But one lived at home, and a daughter, the wife of a lieutenant in the navy, whom I never saw. I boarded with them for six months, or thereabout.”

“You never saw the daughter! How was that?”

“I must have expressed myself awkwardly if I conveyed any such idea. I did not meet the seafaring husband who was off upon a long cruise. The wife I met constantly—knew very well. You need not look at me so intently, love, as if you feared that some dark mystery lurked behind this matter-of-fact recital. If I do not tell you every event of my former life, it is not because it was vile. I could not sustain the light of your innocent eyes if I had ever been guilty of aught dishonorable or criminal. But even the follies and mistakes of a young man's early career are not fit themes for your ears. And I was no wiser, no more wary, than other youths of the same age; was apt to believe that fair which was only specious, and that I might play, uninjured, with edged tools. Nor had I seen you then, my treasure—my snow-drop of purity! Mabel! do you know how solemn a thing it is to be loved and trusted by a man, as I love and confide in you? It terrifies me when I think of the absoluteness of my dependence upon your fidelity—of how rich I am in having you—how poor, wretched, and miserable I should be without you. I shall not draw a free breath until you are mine beyond the chance of recall.”

“Nobody else wants me!” breathed Mabel in his ear, nestling within the arm that enfolded and held her tightly in the corner of the piazza shaded by the creeper. “The danger of losing me is not imminent to-night, at all events,” she resumed, presently, with a touch of the sportiveness that lent her manner an airy charm in lighter talk than that which had engrossed her for the past hour.

The evening was warm and still to sultriness, and the moonlight, filtered into pensive pallor through a low-lying haze, yet sufficed to show how confidingly Imogene leaned upon her attendant in sauntering down the long main alley of the garden. Rosa was at the piano in the parlor, singing to the enamored Alfred. Mrs. Sutton had withdrawn to her own room to ruminate upon the astounding disclosure of her nephew's engagement, while Winston bent over his study-table busy with the interrupted letter his aunt had seen in his portfolio.

“There is no one here who has the leisure or the disposition to contest your rights, you perceive,” said Mabel, running through a laughing summary of their companions' occupations.

“Betrothals are epidemic in this household and neighborhood,” Winston was writing. “There are no fewer than three pairs of turtles cooing down stairs as I pen this to you, my bird of paradise. The case that next to mine—to ours—commands my interest is that of my sister. I came home to learn that the little Mabel I used to hold on my knee had entered into an engagement—conditional upon my sanction—with that traditional tricky personage, a Philadelphia lawyer—Mr. Frederic Chilton, at the door of whose manifold perfections, as set forth by my loquacious aunt, you may lay the blame of this delayed epistle. I know nothing of this aspirant to the dignity of brotherhood with myself, saving the facts that he is tolerably good looking, claims to be the scion of an old Maryland family, and that self-conceit is apparently his predominant quality.”

“What is that?” asked Frederic, halting before the windows, of the drawing-room, as a wild, sorrowful strain, like the wail of a breaking heart, arose upon the waveless air.

Rosa was a vocalist of note in her circle, and she had never rendered anything with more effect than she did the song to which even the preoccupied strollers among the garden borders stayed their steps to listen. Through the open casement Mabel and her lover could see the face of the musician, slightly uplifted toward the moonlight; her eyes, dark and dreamy, as under the cloud of many years of weary waiting and final hopelessness. Her articulation was always pure, but the passionate emphasis of every word constrained the breathless attention of her audience to the close of the simple lay:

“A neat conceit that last verse, and the music is a fair imitation of a dying bugle-echo!” said Winston Aylett to himself, resuming the writing he had suspended for a minute. “That girl should take to the stage. If one did not know better, her eyes and singing together would delude him into the idea that she had a heart. Honest Alfred evidently believes that she has, and that the patient labor of love will win it for himself. Bah!”

Frederic and Mabel retired noiselessly from their post of observation, as “honest Alfred” made a motion to take in his the hand lying prone and passive upon the finger-board. They exchanged a smile, significant and tender, in withdrawing.

“We understand the signs of the times,” whispered Frederic, at the upper turn of their promenade. “Heaven bless all true lovers under the sun!”

“Don't!” said Rosa, vehemently, snatching away her hand from her suitor's hold. “Leave me alone! If you touch me again I shall scream! I think you were made up without nerves, either in the heart or in the brain—if you have any!”

Before the aghast Alfred rallied from the recoil occasioned by her gesture and words, her feet were pattering over the oaken hall and staircase in rapid retreat to her chamber.

“You are really happy, then?” queried Mabel. “Quite content?”

“Did I not tell you awhile ago that I was not satisfied?” returned Chilton. “Two months since I should, in anticipation of this hour, have declared that it would be fraught with unalloyed rapture. I was happier yesterday than I am to-day. It is not merely that we must part to-morrow, or that your brother's precautionary measures and disapproval of what has passed between us have acted like a shower-bath to the fervor of my newly born hopes. I am willing that my life should be subjected to the utmost rigor of his researches, and another month, at farthest, will reunite us. Nor do I believe in presentiments. I am more inclined to attribute the uneasiness that has hovered over me all the day to physical causes. We will call it a mild splenetic case, induced by the sultry weather, and the very slow on coming of the storm presaged by your dewless roses.”

He laughed naturally and pleasantly. Having confessed to what he regarded as a ridiculous succumbing of his buoyant spirit to atmospheric influences, he shook off the nightmare as if it had never sat upon him.

Mabel was grave still.

“There is something weirdly oppressive in the night,” she said, in a low, awed tone. “But the burden you describe has weighed me down since morning. While Rosa was singing, I felt suddenly removed from you by a horrid gulf. What if all this should be the preparation to us for some impending danger?”

“Sweet! these are unwholesome vapors of the imagination. Nothing can be a disaster that leaves us to one another,” was the text of Frederic's fond soothing; and by the time Mrs. Sutton descended from her chamber of meditation, to remind Imogene that the seeds of ague and fever lurked in the river-fogs, the couple from the piazza came into the lighted parlor, all smiles and animation, wondering, jocosely, what had become of the recent occupants of the apartment.

Neither reappeared until breakfast-time next morning. Rosa was like freshly-poured champagne, in sweet and sparkle. Alfred, rueful and limp, as if the dripping clouds that verified Mabel's prediction had soaked him all night. He was dry and comfortable—to carry out the figure—within twenty minutes after his beloved fluttered, like a tame canary, into the chair next his own—in five more, was more truly her slave, living in, and upon her smiles—adoring her very caprices as he had never admired another woman's virtues—than he had been prior to the brief, but tempestuous scene over night. She was the life of the party assembled in the dining-room. Imogene had caught cold, walking bareheaded in the evening air, and Tom condoled with her upon her influenza and sore-throat too sincerely to do justice to the rest of his friends and his breakfast. Mr. Aylett was never talkative, and his unvarying, soulless politeness to all produced the conserving effect upon chill and low spirits that the atmosphere of a refrigerator does upon whatever is placed within it. Mrs. Sutton's motherly heart was yearning pityingly over the lovers who were soon to be sundered, while Mabel's essay at cheerful equanimity imposed upon nobody's credulity. Frederic comported himself like a man—the more courageously because the host's cold eye was upon him, and he surmised that sighs and sentimentality would meet very scant indulgence in that quarter. Moreover, he was not so unreasonable as to descry insupportable hardships in this parting. By agreement with Mr. Aylett and his sister, he was, if all went prosperously, to revisit Ridgeley at the end of six weeks, when his design was to entreat his betrothed to name the wedding day. The prospect might well support him under the present trial. He bore Rosa's badinage gallantly, tossing back sprightly and telling rejoinders that called forth the smiling applause of the auditors, and commanded her respectful recognition of him as a foeman worthy of her steel.

“Nine o'clock,” said Winston, at length, consulting his watch, and pushing back his chair. “The carriage will be at the door in fifteen minutes, Mr. Chilton. The road is heavy this morning, and the stage passes the village at ten.”

“I shall be ready,” responded Frederic. “I am sorry your carriage and coachman must be exposed to the rain.”

“That is nothing. They are used to it. I never alter my plan of travel on account of the weather, how ever severe the storm. This warm rain can hurt nobody.”

“It is pouring hard,” remarked Mrs. Button, solicitously. “And that stage is wretchedly uncomfortable in the best weather. I wish you could be persuaded to stay with us until it clears off, Mr. Chilton, and”—making a bold push—“I am sure my nephew concurs in my desire.”

“Mr. Chilton should require no verbal assurance of my hospitable feelings toward him and my other guests,” said Mr. Aylett, frigidly—smooth as ice-cream. “If I forbear to press him to prolong his stay, it is in reflection of the golden law laid down for the direction of hosts—'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.'”

“You are both very kind, but I must go,” Frederic replied, concisely and civilly, following Mabel into the parlor, whither the other visitors were fabled to have repaired. As he had guessed, his betrothed was the only person there; the quartette having dispersed with kindly tact, for which he gave them due credit.

“Don't think hardly of me, dear,” he began, seating himself beside her on the sofa.

“Allow me to offer you a few of the finest cigars I have enjoyed for many years,” said Mr. Aylett, entering in season to check Frederic's movement to encircle Mabel's drooping form with his arm. “You smoke, I believe? You may have an opportunity of indulging in this solace in an empty stage. At least, there is little probability that you will be denied the luxury by the presence of lady passengers. I procured those in Havana, last winter. In case you should like them well enough to order some for yourself, I will give you the address of the merchant from whom I purchased them.”

He wrote a line upon a card, as he might sign a beggar's petition—with a supercilious parade of benevolence—and passed it to the other, who accepted it with a phrase of acknowledgment neither hearty nor grateful. Then the master of the house paced the floor with a slow, regular step, his hands behind him; his countenance placidly ruminative, his thoughts apparently engaged with anything rather than the pain upon the corner-sofa, whose leave-taking he had mercilessly marred. Frederic dumb and furious; Mabel equally dumb and amazed to alarm, knowing as she did that her brother's actions were never purposeless, sat still, their hands clasped stealthily amid the folds of Mabel's dress; their eyes saying the dear and passionate things forbidden to their tongues. Neither would feign indifference, or attempt a lame dialogue upon other topics than those that filled their minds. Mr. Aylett was not one to pay outward heed to hints when he chose to ignore them. He kept up his walk until the carriage was driven around to the front door, informed the parting guest that it awaited his commands, likewise that he would need all the time that remained to him if he hoped to catch the stage; without leaving the room, called to a servant to bring down Mr. Chilton's baggage, and did not lose sight of his sister's lover until the last farewell was said, and Frederic bestowed inside the vehicle. There was nothing offensively officious or malicious in all this. Having declared as an incontrovertible dogma, that a ward could form no engagement without the formal sanction of her legal guardian, he saw fit to put the seal upon the decision at this, their adieu, in a manner they were not likely to forget. An hour's harangue would not have imbued them with the sense of his authority, his determination to exercise it, and their impotency to resist it, as did this practical lesson.

Mrs. Sutton could scarcely restrain her tearful remonstrances against what was, to her perception, an act of arbitrary and wanton cruelty, and other spectators had their views upon the subject.

“Very inconsiderate in Aylett! I wonder how he would like the same game to be played upon himself!” commented Alfred, aside, to his Dulcinea.

Her lip curled in disdainful amusement.

“As if he had ever done an inconsiderate thing since he put off long clothes! There is method in all this, if we were clever enough to fathom it.”

Within herself, she determined that she would solve the enigma before she was a week older.

Frederic cast one hasty, eager look at the portico, as the carriage turned out of the yard. Mabel stood in the foreground, her figure framed by the climbing roses drooping over the front steps. She was very pale, and, forgetful for the moment of the observation of the bystanders, leaned slightly forward, her eyes strained upon the carriage-window—one hand laid upon her heart, the other resting against the pillar nearest her, as for support. She waved her handkerchief, in response to his smile and lifted hat, and simultaneously with this interchange of adieux her brother took her by the arm.

“You are getting wet there, Mabel! Come into the house! It is well I have come back to look after you!”