That shady alley under the linden-trees was a very favorite walk with Peter Barrington. It was a nice cool lane, with a brawling little rivulet close beside it, with here and there a dark silent pool for the dragon-fly to skim over and see his bronzed wings reflected in the still water; and there was a rustic bench or two, where Peter used to sit and fancy he was meditating, while, in reality, he was only watching a speckled lizard in the grass, or listening to the mellow blackbird over his head. I have had occasion once before to remark on the resources of the man of imagination, but I really suspect that for the true luxury of idleness there is nothing like the temperament devoid of fancy. There is a grand breadth about those quiet, peaceful minds over which no shadows flit, and which can find sufficient occupation through the senses, and never have to go “within” for their resources. These men can sit the livelong day and watch the tide break over a rock, or see the sparrow teach her young to fly, or gaze on the bee as he dives into the deep cup of the foxglove, and actually need no more to fill the hours. For them there is no memory with its dark bygones, there is no looming future with its possible misfortunes; there is simply a half-sleepy present, with soft sounds and sweet odors through it,—a balmy kind of stupor, from which the awaking comes without a shock.

When Barrington reached his favorite seat, and lighted his cigar,—it is painting the lily for such men to smoke,—he intended to have thought over the details of Withering's letter, which were both curious and interesting; he intended to consider attentively certain points which, as Withering said, “he must master before he could adopt a final resolve;” but they were knotty points, made knottier, too, by hard Hindoo words for things unknown, and names totally unpronounceable. He used to think that he understood “George's claim” pretty well; he had fancied it was a clear and very intelligible case, that half a dozen honest men might have come to a decision on in an hour's time; but now he began to have a glimmering perception that George must have been egregiously duped and basely betrayed, and that the Company were not altogether unreasonable in assuming their distrust of him. Now, all these considerations coming down upon him at once were overwhelming, and they almost stunned him. Even his late attempt to enlighten his sister Dinah on a matter he so imperfectly understood now recoiled upon him, and added to his own mystification.

“Well, well,” muttered he, at last, “I hope Tom sees his way through it,”—Tom was Withering,—“and if he does, there's no need of my bothering my head about it. What use would there be in lawyers if they hadn't got faculties sharper than other folk? and as to 'making up my mind,' my mind is made up already, that I want to win the cause if he'll only show me how.” From these musings he was drawn off by watching a large pike,—the largest pike, he thought, he had ever seen,—which would from time to time dart out from beneath a bank, and after lying motionless in the middle of the pool for a minute or so, would, with one whisk of its tail, skim back again to its hiding-place. “That fellow has instincts of its own to warn him,” thought he; “he knows he was n't safe out there. He sees some peril that I cannot see; and that ought to be the way with Tom, for, after all, the lawyers are just pikes, neither more nor less.” At this instant a man leaped across the stream, and hurriedly passed into the copse. “What! Mr. Conyers—Conyers, is that you?” cried Barrington; and the young man turned and came towards him. “I am glad to see you all safe and sound again,” said Peter; “we waited dinner half an hour for you, and have passed all the time since in conjecturing what might have befallen you.”

“Did n't Miss Barrington say—did not Miss Barrington know—” He stopped in deep confusion, and could not finish his speech.

“My sister knew nothing,—at least, she did not tell me any reason for your absence.”

“No, not for my absence,” began he once more, in the same embarrassment; “but as I had explained to her that I was obliged to leave this suddenly,—to start this evening—”

“To start this evening! and whither?”

“I cannot tell; I don't know,—that is, I have no plans.”

“My dear boy,” said the old man, affectionately, as he laid his hand on the other's arm, “if you don't know where you are going, take my word for it there is no such great necessity to go.”

“Yes, but there is,” replied he, quickly; “at least Miss Barrington thinks so, and at the time we spoke together she made me believe she was in the right.”

“And are you of the same opinion now?” asked Peter, with a humorous drollery in his eye.

“I am,—that is, I was a few moments back. I mean, that whenever I recall the words she spoke to me, I feel their full conviction.”

“Come, now, sit down here beside me! It can scarcely be anything I may not be a party to. Just let me hear the case like a judge in chamber”—and he smiled at an illustration that recalled his favorite passion, “I won't pretend to say my sister has not a wiser head—as I well know she has a far better heart—than myself, but now and then she lets a prejudice or a caprice or even a mere apprehension run away with her, and it's just possible it is some whim of this kind is now uppermost.”

Conyers only shook his head dissentingly, and said nothing.

“Maybe I guess it,—I suspect that I guess it,” said Peter, with a sly drollery about his mouth. “My sister has a notion that a young man and a young woman ought no more to be in propinquity than saltpetre and charcoal. She has been giving me a lecture on my blindness, and asking if I can't see this, that, and the other; but, besides being the least observant of mankind, I'm one of the most hopeful as regards whatever I wish to be. Now we have all of us gone on so pleasantly together, with such a thorough good understanding—such loyalty, as the French would call it—that I can't, for the life of me, detect any ground for mistrust or dread. Have n't I hit the blot, Conyers—eh?” cried he, as the young fellow grew redder and redder, till his face became crimson.

“I assured Miss Barrington,” began he, in a faltering, broken voice, “that I set too much store on the generous confidence you extended to me to abuse it; that, received as I was, like one of your own blood and kindred, I never could forget the frank trustfulness with which you discussed everything before me, and made me, so to say, 'One of you.' The moment, however, that my intimacy suggested a sense of constraint, I felt the whole charm of my privilege would have departed, and it is for this reason I am going!” The last word was closed with a deep sigh, and he turned away his head as he concluded.

“And for this reason you shall not go one step,” said Peter, slapping him cordially on the shoulder. “I verily believe that women think the world was made for nothing but love-making, just as the crack engineer believed rivers were intended by Providence to feed navigable canals; but you and I know a little better, not to say that a young fellow with the stamp gentleman indelibly marked on his forehead would not think of making a young girl fresh from a convent—a mere child in the ways of life—the mark of his attentions. Am I not right?”

“I hope and believe you are!”

“Stay where you are, then; be happy, and help us to feel so; and the only pledge I ask is, that whenever you suspect Dinah to be a shrewder observer and a truer prophet than her brother—you understand me—you'll just come and say, 'Peter Barrington, I'm off; good-bye!'”

“There's my hand on it,” said he, grasping the old man's with warmth. “There's only one point—I have told Miss Barrington that I would start this evening.”

“She'll scarcely hold you very closely to your pledge.”

“But, as I understand her, you are going back to Ireland?”

“And you are coming along with us. Isn't that a very simple arrangement?”

“I know it would be a very pleasant one.”

“It shall be, if it depend on me. I want to make you a fisherman too. When I was a young man, it was my passion to make every one a good horseman. If I liked a fellow, and found out that he couldn't ride to hounds, it gave me a shock little short of hearing that there was a blot on his character, so associated in my mind had become personal dash and prowess in the field with every bold and manly characteristic. As I grew older, and the rod usurped the place of the hunting-whip, I grew to fancy that your angler would be the truest type of a companion; and if you but knew,” added he, as a glassy fulness dulled his eyes, “what a flattery it is to an old fellow when a young one will make a comrade of him,—what a smack of bygone days it brings up, and what sunshine it lets in on the heart,—take my word for it, you young fellows are never so vain of an old companion as we are of a young one! What are you so thoughtful about?”

“I was thinking how I was to make this explanation to Miss Barrington.”

“You need not make it at all; leave the whole case in my hands. My sister knows that I owe you an amende and a heavy one. Let this go towards a part payment of it. But here she comes in search of me. Step away quietly, and when we meet at the tea-table all will have been settled.”

Conyers had but time to make his escape, when Miss Barrington came up.

“I thought I should find you mooning down here, Peter,” said she, sharply. “Whenever there is anything to be done or decided on, a Barrington is always watching a fly on a fish-pond.”

“Not the women of the family, Dinah,—not the women. But what great emergency is before us now?”

“No great emergency, as you phrase it, at all, but what to men like yourself is frequently just as trying,—an occasion that requires a little tact. I have discovered—what I long anticipated has come to pass—Conyers and Fifine are on very close terms of intimacy, which might soon become attachment. I have charged him with it, and he has not altogether denied it. On the whole he has behaved well, and he goes away to-night.”

“I have just seen him, Dinah. I got at his secret, not without a little dexterity on my part, and learned what had passed between you. We talked the thing over very calmly together, and the upshot is—he's not going.”

“Not going! not going! after the solemn assurance he gave me!”

“But of which I absolved him, sister Dinah; or rather, which I made him retract.”

“Peter Barrington, stop!” cried she, holding her hands to her temples. “I want a little time to recover myself. I must have time, or I'll not answer for my senses. Just reply to one question. I 'll ask you, have you taken an oath—are you under a vow to be the ruin of your family?”

“I don't think I have, Dinah. I 'm doing everything for the best.”

“If there's a phrase in the language condemns the person that uses it, it's 'Doing everything for the best.' What does it mean but a blind, uninquiring, inconsiderate act, the work of a poor brain and sickly conscience? Don't talk to me, sir, of doing for the best, but do the best, the very best, according to the lights that guide you. You know well, perfectly well, that Fifine has no fortune, and that this young man belongs to a very rich and a very ambitious family, and that to encourage what might lead to attachment between them would be to store up a cruel wrong and a great disappointment.”

“My dear Dinah, you speak like a book, but I don't agree with you.”

“You don't. Will you please to state why?”

“In the first place, Dinah, forgive me for saying it, but we men do not take your view of these cases. We neither think that love is as catching or as dangerous as the smallpox. We imagine that two young people can associate together every day and yet never contract a lien that might break their hearts to dissolve.”

“Talking politics together, perhaps; or the state of the Three per Cents?”

“Not exactly that, but talking of fifty other things that interest their time of life and tempers. Have they not songs, drawings, flowers, landscapes, and books, with all their thousand incidents, to discuss? Just remember what that writer who calls himself 'Author of Waverley'—what he alone has given us of people to talk over just as if we knew them.”

“Brother Peter, I have no patience with you. You enumerate one by one all the ingredients, and you disparage the total. You tell of the flour, and the plums, and the suet, and the candied lemon, but you cry out against the pudding! Don't you see that the very themes you leave for them all conduce to what you ignore, and that your music and painting and romance-reading only lead to love-making? Don't you see this, or are you in reality—I didn't want to say it, but you have made me—are you an old fool?”

“I hope not, Dinah; but I'm not so sure you don't think me one.”

“It's nothing to the purpose whether I do or not,” said she; “the question is, have you asked this young man to come back with us to Ireland?”

“I have, and he is coming.”

“I could have sworn to it,” said she, with a sudden energy; “and if there was anything more stupid, you 'd have done it also.” And with this speech, more remarkable for its vigor than its politeness, she turned away and left him.

Ere I close the chapter and the subject, let me glance, and only glance, at the room where Conyers is now standing beside Josephine. She is drawing, not very attentively or carefully, perhaps, and he is bending over her and relating, as it seems, something that has occurred to him, and has come to the end with the words, “And though I was to have gone this evening, it turns out that now I am to stay and accompany you to Ireland.”

“Don't sigh so painfully over it, however,” said she, gravely; “for when you come to mention how distressing it is, I 'm sure they 'll let you off.”

“Fifine,” said he, reproachfully, “is this fair, is this generous?”

“I don't know whether it be unfair, I don't want it to be generous,” said she, boldly.

“In point of fact, then, you only wish for me here to quarrel with, is that the truth?”

“I think it better fun disagreeing with you than always saying how accurate you are, and how wise, and how well-judging. That atmosphere of eternal agreement chokes me; I feel as if I were suffocating.”

“It's not a very happy temperament; it's not a disposition to boast of.”

“You never did hear me boast of it; but I have heard you very vainglorious about your easy temper and your facile nature, which were simply indolence. Now, I have had more than enough of that in the convent, and I long for a little activity.”

“Even if it were hazardous?”

“Even if it were hazardous,” echoed she. “But here comes Aunt Dinah, with a face as stern as one of the sisters, and an eye that reminds me of penance and bread and water; so help me to put up my drawings, and say nothing of what we were talking.”

“My brother has just told me, Mr. Conyers,” said she, in a whisper, “a piece of news which it only depends upon you to make a most agreeable arrangement.”

“I trust you may count upon me, madam,” said he, in the same tone, and bowed low as he spoke.

“Then come with me and let us talk it over,” said she, as she took his arm and led him away.

END OF VOL. I.