Mabel was mute, her eyes downcast.

"I agree with him there, at any rate. You are nineteen years of age;

he twenty-five. Your property is unincumbered, and can be

transferred to your keeping at very short notice. Mr. Chiiton

represents that his income from his patrimonial estate, eked out by

professional gains, is sufficient to warrant him in marrying

forthwith. I shall see that no time is lost in making the inquiries

upon which depends the progress of the negotiation. Business calls

me North in a week or ten days. I shall stop a day in Philadelphia,

and settle your affair."

The frightfully business-like manner of disposing of her happiness

appalled the listener into silence. The loss of Frederic; the

destruction of her love-dream; the weary years of lonely

wretchedness that would follow the bereavement, were to him only

unimportant incidentals to her "affair;" weighed in the scale of his

impartial judgment no more than would unconsidered dust. For the

first time in the life to which he had been the guiding-star, she

ventured to wonder if the unswerving rectitude that had elevated him

above the level of other men, in her esteem and affection, were so

glorious a thing after all; if a tempering, not of human frailty,

but of charity for the shortcomings, sympathy for the needs, of

ordinary mortals, would not subdue the effulgence of his talents and

virtues into mild lustre, more tolerable to the optics of fallible

beholders Unsuspicious, with all his astuteness, of her sacrilegious doubts,

Winston proceeded: "In the event of your marriage, you would desire, no doubt, that

Mrs. Sutton should take up her abode with you? You would find her

useful in many ways, and she would get on amicably with her

husband's godson."

"I do not think she expects to go with me," answered Mabel,

staggered by his coolly confident air. "I certainly have never

entertained the idea. I imagined that she would remain with you,

while you needed her services."

"That will not be long. I shall be married on the 10th of October."

"Married! brother!" starting up in amazement. "You are not in

earnest!"

"I should not jest upon such a theme," replied Winston, in grave

rebuke. "My plans are definitely laid. It is not my purpose to keep

them secret a day longer. I meant to communicate them to yourself

and Mrs. Sutton this afternoon, but yours claimed precedence."

Mabel sat down again, totally confounded, and struggling hard with

her tears. The thought of her brother's marriage was not in itself

disagreeable. She had often lamented his insensibility to the

attractions of such women as she fancied would add to his happiness,

and grace the high place to which his wife would be exalted. She

never liked to hear him called invulnerable; repelled the hypothesis

of his incurable bachelorhood as derogatory to his heart and head.

This unlooked-for intelligence, had it reached her in a different

way, would have delighted as much as it astonished her. The fear

lest her consent to wed Frederic and leave Ridgeley might be the

occasion of discomfort and sadness to her forsaken brother had

shadowed all her visions of future bliss. She ought to have hailed

with unmixed satisfaction the certainty that he would not miss her

sisterly ministrations, or feel the need of her companionship in

that of one nearer and dearer than was his child-ward. She had

striven not to resent even in her own mind, his cavalier treatment

of her lover; had hearkened respectfully and without demur to his

unsympathizing calculations of what was possible and what feasible

in the project of her union with the man of her choice. For how

could he know anything of the palpitations, the anxieties, the

raptures of love, when he was a stranger to the touch of a kindred

emotion? He meant well; he had her welfare in view; unfortunate as

was his style of discussing the means for insuring this--for he

loved her dearly, dearly!




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