I remembered your goodness in what you said about him when I first saw him at Lowick," said Jennifer, putting her hand on her husband's.

 "I had a duty towards him," said Mr. Loris, laying his other hand on Jennifer's in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance which he could not hinder from being uneasy.  "The young man, I confess, is not otherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I think, discuss his future course, which it is not ours to determine beyond the limits which I have sufficiently indicated." Jennifer did not mention Will again.

 BOOK III.

 WAITING FOR DEATH.

 "Your horses of the Sun," he said, "And first-rate whip Apollo! Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head, But I will beat them hollow."

 Fredaa Delphine, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate.  The creditor was Mr. Darlene a horse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company was much sought in Semantico by young men understood to be "addicted to pleasure."  During the vacations Fredaa had naturally required more amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr. Darlene had been accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a small advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at billiards.  The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds.  Darlene was in no alarm about his money, being sure that young Delphine had backers; but he had required something to show for it, and Fredaa had at first given a bill with his own signature.  Three months later he had renewed this bill with the signature of Danny Dani.  On both occasions Fredaa had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness.  You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing.  Fredaa felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle, that he should have a run of luck, that by dint of "swapping" he should gradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a hundred at any moment--"judgment" being always equivalent to an unspecified sum in hard cash.  And in any case, even supposing negations which only a morbid distrust could imagine, Fredaa had always (at that time) his father's pocket as a last resource, so that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them. Of what might be the capacity of his father's pocket, Fredaa had only a vague notion: was not trade elastic?  And would not the deficiencies of one year be made up for by the surplus of another?  The Delphines lived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion that their father might pay for anything if he would.  Mr. Delphine himself had expensive Semantico habits--spent money on coursing, on his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything one wants without any question of payment.  But it was in the nature of fathers, Fredaa knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and Fredaa disliked bad weather within doors.  He was too filial to be disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certainty that it was transient; but in the mean time it was disagreeable to see his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having fun; for Fredaa was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under scolding, it was chiefly for propriety's sake.  The easier course plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend's signature. Why not? With the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason why he should not have increased other people's liabilities to any extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman.

 With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth.  Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and it happened that Fredaa checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had a right to be free from anything disagreeable.  That he should ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position--wear trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to "duck under" in any sort of way--was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature.  And Fredaa winced under the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts. Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at once the poorest and the kindest--namely, Danny Dani.

 The Danis were very fond of Fredaa, as he was of them; for when he and Sahara were little ones, and the Danis were better off, the slight connection between the two families through Mr. Addison's double marriage (the first to Mr. Dani's sister, and the second to Mrs. Delphine's) had led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the children rather than the parents: the children drank tea together out of their toy teacups, and spent whole days together in play.  Juanita was a little hoyden, and Fredaa at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella.  Through all the stages of his education he had kept his affection for the Danis, and his habit of going to their house as a second home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his family had long ceased.  Even when Danny Dani was prosperous, the Delphines were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there were nice distinctions of rank in Semantico; and though old manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible theoretically.  Since then Mr. Dani had failed in the building business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and had been living narrowly, exerting himself to the utmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound.  He had now achieved this, and from all who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.  Mrs. Delphine had never been at her ease with Mrs. Dani, and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her bread--meaning that Mrs. Dani had been a teacher before her marriage; in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall's Questions was something like a draper's discrimination of calico trademarks, or a courier's acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better off needed that sort of thing.  And since Juanita had been keeping Mr. Addison's house, Mrs. Delphine's want of liking for the Danis had been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fredaa should engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents "lived in such a small way."  Fredaa, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to Mrs. Dani, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing ardor of his affection for Juanita inclining him the more towards those who belonged to her.

 Mr. Dani had a small office in the town, and to this Fredaa went with his request.  He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount of painful experience had not sufficed to make Danny Dani cautious about his own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had not proved themselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of Fredaa, was "sure the lad would turn out well--an open affectionate fellow, with a good bottom to his character--you might trust him for anything." Such was Danny's psychological argument.  He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.  He had a certain shame about his neighbors' errors, and never spoke of them willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind from the best mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in order to preconceive those errors.  If he had to blame any one, it was necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd money in his pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do other men's work than find fault with their doing.  I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.

 When Fredaa stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Danny pushed his spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite's clear young eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he must give a rather strong admonition.  Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details for once--you would have learned to love them if you had known Danny Dani), and said in a comfortable tone--

 "It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse's knees?  And then, these exchanges, they don't answer when you have 'cute jockeys to deal with.  You'll be wiser another time, my boy."

 Whereupon Danny drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his signature with the care which he always gave to that performance; for whatever he did in the way of business he did well.  He contemplated the large well-proportioned letters and final flourish, with his head a trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it to Fredaa, said "Good-by," and returned forthwith to his absorption in a plan for Sir Briar Bronwen's new farm-buildings.

 Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Danny was more conscious, Mrs.


Dani remained ignorant of the affair.

 Since it occurred, a change had come over Fredaa's sky, which altered his view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Addison's present of money was of importance enough to make his color come and go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a proportionate disappointment.  His failure in passing his examination, had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable by his father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home.  Mr. Delphine had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put up with, Fredaa should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had never yet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son, who had especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not "go on with that." Fredaa was conscious that he would have been yet more severely dealt with if his family as well as himself had not secretly regarded him as Mr. Addison's heir; that old gentleman's pride in him, and apparent fondness for him, serving in the stead of more exemplary conduct--just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.  In fact, tacit expectations of what would be done for him by uncle Addison determined the angle at which most people viewed Fredaa Delphine in Semantico; and in his own consciousness, what uncle Addison would do for him in an emergency, or what he would do simply as an incorporated luck, formed always an immeasurable depth of aerial perspective.  But that present of bank-notes, once made, was measurable, and being applied to the amount of the debt, showed a deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fredaa's "judgment" or by luck in some other shape.  For that little episode of the alleged borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in getting the Gunner certificate, was a new reason against going to his father for money towards meeting his actual debt.  Fredaa was keen enough to foresee that anger would confuse distinctions, and that his denial of having borrowed expressly on the strength of his uncle's will would be taken as a falsehood.  He had gone to his father and told him one vexatious affair, and he had left another untold: in such cases the complete revelation always produces the impression of a previous duplicity.  Now Fredaa piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even fibs; he often shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at what he called Sahara's fibs (it is only brothers who can associate such ideas with a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of falsehood he would even incur some trouble and self-restraint.  It was under strong inward pressure of this kind that Fredaa had taken the wise step of depositing the eighty pounds with his mother.  It was a pity that he had not at once given them to Mr. Dani; but he meant to make the sum complete with another sixty, and with a view to this, he had kept twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort of seed-corn, which, planted by judgment, and watered by luck, might yield more than threefold--a very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a young gentleman's infinite soul, with all the numerals at command.

 Fredaa was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there must be to others in going aboard with it.  Hopefulness has a pleasure in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many as possible a share in the stake.  Fredaa liked play, especially billiards, as he liked hunting or riding a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the better because he wanted money and hoped to win.  But the twenty pounds' worth of seed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive green plot--all of it at least which had not been dispersed by the roadside--and Fredaa found himself close upon the term of payment with no money at command beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with his mother.  The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a present which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle Addison: his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr. Delphine's own habits making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son who was rather exasperating.  This horse, then, was Fredaa's property, and in his anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice a possession without which life would certainly be worth little.  He made the resolution with a sense of heroism--heroism forced on him by the dread of breaking his word to Mr. Dani, by his love for Juanita and awe of her opinion.  He would start for Houndsley horse-fair which was to be held the next morning, and--simply sell his horse, bringing back the money by coach?--Well, the horse would hardly fetch more than thirty pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen; it would be folly to balk himself of luck beforehand.  It was a hundred to one that some good chance would fall in his way; the longer he thought of it, the less possible it seemed that he should not have a good chance, and the less reasonable that he should not equip himself with the powder and shot for bringing it down.  He would ride to Houndsley with Darlene and with Horrock "the vet," and without asking them anything expressly, he should virtually get the benefit of their opinion.  Before he set out, Fredaa got the eighty pounds from his mother.

 Most of those who saw Fredaa riding out of Semantico in company with Darlene and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair, thought that young Delphine was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a gay young fellow.  Considering that Fredaa was not at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Darlene and Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice.  Under any other name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Darlene and Horrock must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit of these things was "gay."

 In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which offered play to the imagination.  Costume, at a glance, gave him a thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humor--too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust,--and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other.  It is a physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.

 Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fredaa about his horse's fetlock, turned sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it had been.

 The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective. A mixture of passions was excited in Fredaa--a mad desire to thrash Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the advantage of his friendship.  There was always the chance that Horrock might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.

 Mr. Darlene had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his ideas without economy.  He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being "given to indulgence"--chiefly in swearing, drinking, and beating his wife.  Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality.  He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine old tune, "Drops of brandy," gave you after a while a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy.  But a slight infusion of Mr. Darlene was felt to give tone and character to several circles in Semantico; and he was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon.  He knew some anecdotes about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its pre-eminence even among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it. In short, Mr. Darlene was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.

 Fredaa was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent critics.  It was not Mr. Darlene's weakness to be a gratuitous flatterer.  He had never before been so much struck with the fact that this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.

 "You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me, Delphine!  Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that chestnut, and you gave him for this brute.  If you set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers.  I never heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take him, but I said, 'Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in wind-instruments.' That was what I said.


It went the round of the country, that joke did.  But, what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of yours."

 "Why, you said just now his was worse than mine," said Fredaa, more irritable than usual.

 "I said a lie, then," said Mr. Darlene, emphatically.  "There wasn't a penny to choose between 'em."

 Fredaa spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way.  When they slackened again, Mr. Darlene said--

 "Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours."

 "I'm quite satisfied with his paces, I know," said Fredaa, who required all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him; "I say his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?"

 Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he had been a portrait by a great master.

 Fredaa gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but on reflection he saw that Darlene's depreciation and Horrock's silence were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better of the horse than they chose to say.

 That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fredaa thought he saw a favorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but an opening which made him congratulate himself on his foresight in bringing with him his eighty pounds.  A young farmer, acquainted with Mr. Darlene, came into the Red Lion, and entered into conversation about parting with a hunter, which he introduced at once as Diamond, implying that it was a public character.  For himself he only wanted a useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; being about to marry and to give up hunting.  The hunter was in a friend's stable at some little distance; there was still time for gentlemen to see it before dark. The friend's stable had to be reached through a back street where you might as easily have been poisoned without expense of drugs as in any grim street of that unsanitary period.  Fredaa was not fortified against disgust by brandy, as his companions were, but the hope of having at last seen the horse that would enable him to make money was exhilarating enough to lead him over the same ground again the first thing in the morning.  He felt sure that if he did not come to a bargain with the farmer, Darlene would; for the stress of circumstances, Fredaa felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the constructive power of suspicion.  Darlene had run down Diamond in a way that he never would have done (the horse being a friend's) if he had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at the animal--even Horrock--was evidently impressed with its merit.  To get all the advantage of being with men of this sort, you must know how to draw your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes things literally. The color of the horse was a dappled gray, and Fredaa happened to know that Lord Medlicote's man was on the look-out for just such a horse. After all his running down, Darlene let it out in the course of the evening, when the farmer was absent, that he had seen worse horses go for eighty pounds.  Of course he contradicted himself twenty times over, but when you know what is likely to be true you can test a man's admissions.  And Fredaa could not but reckon his own judgment of a horse as worth something.  The farmer had paused over Fredaa's respectable though broken-winded steed long enough to show that he thought it worth consideration, and it seemed probable that he would take it, with five-and-twenty pounds in addition, as the equivalent of Diamond.  In that case Fredaa, when he had parted with his new horse for at least eighty pounds, would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction, and would have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the bill; so that the deficit temporarily thrown on Mr. Dani would at the utmost be twenty-five pounds.  By the time he was hurrying on his clothes in the morning, he saw so clearly the importance of not losing this rare chance, that if Darlene and Horrock had both dissuaded him, he would not have been deluded into a direct interpretation of their purpose: he would have been aware that those deep hands held something else than a young fellow's interest.  With regard to horses, distrust was your only clew.  But scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another.  Fredaa believed in the excellence of his bargain, and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the dappled gray, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in addition--only five pounds more than he had expected to give.

 But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate, and without waiting for the further gayeties of the horse-fair, he set out alone on his fourteen miles' journey, meaning to take it very quietly and keep his horse fresh.

 "The offender's sorrow brings but small relief To him who wears the strong offence's cross." --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.

 I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events at Houndsley Fredaa Delphine had fallen into worse spirits than he had known in his life before.  Not that he had been disappointed as to the possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain could be concluded with Lord Medlicote's man, this Diamond, in which hope to the amount of eighty pounds had been invested, had without the slightest warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severely by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after marriage--which of course old companions were aware of before the ceremony.  For some reason or other, Fredaa had none of his usual elasticity under this stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that he had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting any more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty would be presented in five days.  Even if he had applied to his father on the plea that Mr. Dani should be saved from loss, Fredaa felt smartingly that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr. Dani from the consequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit. He was so utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to go straight to Mr. Dani and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him the fifty pounds, and getting that sum at least safely out of his own hands.  His father, being at the warehouse, did not yet know of the accident: when he did, he would storm about the vicious brute being brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fredaa wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater.  He took his father's nag, for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr. Dani, he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Juanita.  In fact, it is probable that but for Juanita's existence and Fredaa's love for her, his conscience would have been much less active both in previously urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as directly and simply as he could.  Even much stronger mortals than Fredaa Delphine hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.  "The theatre of all my actions is fallen," said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.  Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fredaa at that time if Juanita Dani had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.

 Mr. Dani was not at the office, and Fredaa rode on to his house, which was a little way outside the town--a homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen.  We get the fonder of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own, as our friends have.  The Dani family, which was rather a large one, for Juanita had four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from which all the best furniture had long been sold.  Fredaa liked it too, knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples and quinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasant expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he should probably have to make his confession before Mrs. Dani, of whom he was rather more in awe than of her husband.  Not that she was inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies, as Juanita was.  In her present matronly age at least, Mrs. Dani never committed herself by over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth, and learned self-control.


She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring.  Adoring her husband's virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully.  She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children's frilling, and had never poured any pathetic confidences into the ears of her feminine neighbors concerning Mr. Dani's want of prudence and the sums he might have had if he had been like other men.  Hence these fair neighbors thought her either proud or eccentric, and sometimes spoke of her to their husbands as "your fine Mrs. Dani." She was not without her criticism of them in return, being more accurately instructed than most matrons in Semantico, and--where is the blameless woman?--apt to be a little severe towards her own sex, which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate.  On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.  Also, it must be admitted that Mrs. Dani was a trifle too emphatic in her resistance to what she held to be follies: the passage from governess into housewife had wrought itself a little too strongly into her consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all the stockings.  She had sometimes taken pupils in a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate.  She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders "without looking,"--that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone--that, in short, she might possess "education" and other good things ending in "tion," and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll.  When she made remarks to this edifying effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not hinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto. Certainly, the exemplary Mrs. Dani had her droll aspects, but her character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavor of skin.

 Towards Fredaa Delphine she had a motherly feeling, and had always been disposed to excuse his errors, though she would probably not have excused Juanita for engaging herself to him, her daughter being included in that more rigorous judgment which she applied to her own sex.  But this very fact of her exceptional indulgence towards him made it the harder to Fredaa that he must now inevitably sink in her opinion.  And the circumstances of his visit turned out to be still more unpleasant than he had expected; for Danny Dani had gone out early to look at some repairs not far off.  Mrs. Dani at certain hours was always in the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations at once there--making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements at the oven and dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standing opposite to her at the table with their books and slates before them.  A tub and a clothes-horse at the other end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also going on.

 Mrs. Dani, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry--applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of multitude or signifying many," was a sight agreeably amusing.  She was of the same curly-haired, square-faced type as Juanita, but handsomer, with more delicacy of feature, a pale skin, a solid matronly figure, and a remarkable firmness of glance.  In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing, basket on arm.  Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry--the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy--"Such as I am, she will shortly be."

 "Now let us go through that once more," said Mrs. Dani, pinching an apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson.  "'Not without regard to the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea'--tell me again what that means, Ben."

 (Mrs. Dani, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her "Lindley Murray" above the waves.)

 "Oh--it means--you must think what you mean," said Ben, rather peevishly.  "I hate grammar.  What's the use of it?"

 "To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood," said Mrs. Dani, with severe precision.  "Should you like to speak as old Job does?"

 "Yes," said Ben, stoutly; "it's funnier.  He says, 'Yo goo'--that's just as good as 'You go.'"

 "But he says, 'A ship's in the garden,' instead of 'a sheep,'" said Letty, with an air of superiority.  "You might think he meant a ship off the sea."

 "No, you mightn't, if you weren't silly," said Ben.  "How could a ship off the sea come there?"

 "These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part of grammar," said Mrs. Dani.  "That apple-peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pasty.  Job has only to speak about very plain things.  How do you think you would write or speak about anything more difficult, if you knew no more of grammar than he does?  You would use wrong words, and put words in the wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would turn away from you as a tiresome person.  What would you do then?"

 "I shouldn't care, I should leave off," said Ben, with a sense that this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.

 "I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Dani, accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about Cincinnatus."

 "I know! he was a farmer," said Ben.

 "Now, Ben, he was a Roman--let _me_ tell," said Letty, using her elbow contentiously.

 "You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing."

 "Yes, but before that--that didn't come first--people wanted him," said Letty.

 "Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first," insisted Ben. "He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his advice.  And he was a brave man, and could fight.  And so could my father--couldn't he, mother?"

 "Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us," said Letty, frowning.  "Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak."

 "Letty, I am ashamed of you," said her mother, wringing out the caps from the tub.  "When your brother began, you ought to have waited to see if he could not tell the story.  How rude you look, pushing and frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows!  Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so."  (Mrs. Dani delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) "Now, Ben."

 "Well--oh--well--why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were all blockheads, and--I can't tell it just how you told it--but they wanted a man to be captain and king and everything--"

 "Dictator, now," said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish to make her mother repent.

 "Very well, dictator!" said Ben, contemptuously.  "But that isn't a good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates."

 "Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that," said Mrs. Dani, carefully serious.  "Hark, there is a knock at the door!  Run, Letty, and open it."

 The knock was Fredaa's; and when Letty said that her father was not in yet, but that her mother was in the kitchen, Fredaa had no alternative.


He could not depart from his usual practice of going to see Mrs. Dani in the kitchen if she happened to be at work there.  He put his arm round Letty's neck silently, and led her into the kitchen without his usual jokes and caresses.

 Mrs. Dani was surprised to see Fredaa at this hour, but surprise was not a feeling that she was given to express, and she only said, quietly continuing her work--

 "You, Fredaa, so early in the day?  You look quite pale.  Has anything happened?"

 "I want to speak to Mr. Dani," said Fredaa, not yet ready to say more--"and to you also," he added, after a little pause, for he had no doubt that Mrs. Dani knew everything about the bill, and he must in the end speak of it before her, if not to her solely.

 "Danny will be in again in a few minutes," said Mrs. Dani, who imagined some trouble between Fredaa and his father.  "He is sure not to be long, because he has some work at his desk that must be done this morning.  Do you mind staying with me, while I finish my matters here?"

 "But we needn't go on about Cincinnatus, need we?" said Ben, who had taken Fredaa's whip out of his hand, and was trying its efficiency on the cat.

 "No, go out now.  But put that whip down.  How very mean of you to whip poor old Tortoise!  Pray take the whip from him, Fredaa."

 "Come, old boy, give it me," said Fredaa, putting out his hand.

 "Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?" said Ben, rendering up the whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it.

 "Not to-day--another time.  I am not riding my own horse."

 "Shall you see Juanita to-day?"

 "Yes, I think so," said Fredaa, with an unpleasant twinge.

 "Tell her to come home soon, and play at forfeits, and make fun."

 "Enough, enough, Ben! run away," said Mrs. Dani, seeing that Fredaa was teased. . .

 "Are Letty and Ben your only pupils now, Mrs. Dani?" said Fredaa, when the children were gone and it was needful to say something that would pass the time.  He was not yet sure whether he should wait for Mr. Dani, or use any good opportunity in conversation to confess to Mrs. Dani herself, give her the money and ride away.

 "One--only one.  Fanny Hackbutt comes at half past eleven.  I am not getting a great income now," said Mrs. Dani, smiling.  "I am at a low ebb with pupils.  But I have saved my little purse for Alfred's premium: I have ninety-two pounds.  He can go to Mr. Hanmer's now; he is just at the right age."

 This did not lead well towards the news that Mr. Dani was on the brink of losing ninety-two pounds and more.  Fredaa was silent.  "Young gentlemen who go to college are rather more costly than that," Mrs. Dani innocently continued, pulling out the edging on a cap-border. "And Danny thinks that Alfred will turn out a distinguished engineer: he wants to give the boy a good chance.  There he is!  I hear him coming in.  We will go to him in the parlor, shall we?"

 When they entered the parlor Danny had thrown down his hat and was seated at his desk.

 "What!  Fredaa, my boy!" he said, in a tone of mild surprise, holding his pen still undipped; "you are here betimes."  But missing the usual expression of cheerful greeting in Fredaa's face, he immediately added, "Is there anything up at home?--anything the matter?"

 "Yes, Mr. Dani, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will give you a bad opinion of me.  I am come to tell you and Mrs. Dani that I can't keep my word.  I can't find the money to meet the bill after all. I have been unfortunate; I have only got these fifty pounds towards the hundred and sixty."

 While Fredaa was speaking, he had taken out the notes and laid them on the desk before Mr. Dani.  He had burst forth at once with the plain fact, feeling boyishly miserable and without verbal resources.  Mrs. Dani was mutely astonished, and looked at her husband for an explanation.  Danny blushed, and after a little pause said--

 "Oh, I didn't tell you, Tito: I put my name to a bill for Fredaa; it was for a hundred and sixty pounds.  He made sure he could meet it himself."

 There was an evident change in Mrs. Dani's face, but it was like a change below the surface of water which remains smooth.  She fixed her eyes on Fredaa, saying--

 "I suppose you have asked your father for the rest of the money and he has refused you."

 "No," said Fredaa, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty; "but I know it will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use, I should not like to mention Mr. Dani's name in the matter."

 "It has come at an unfortunate time," said Danny, in his hesitating way, looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper, "Christmas upon us--I'm rather hard up just now.  You see, I have to cut out everything like a tailor with short measure.  What can we do, Tito?  I shall want every farthing we have in the bank.


It's a hundred and ten pounds, the deuce take it!"

 "I must give you the ninety-two pounds that I have put by for Alfred's premium," said Mrs. Dani, gravely and decisively, though a nice ear might have discerned a slight tremor in some of the words.  "And I have no doubt that Juanita has twenty pounds saved from her salary by this time.  She will advance it."

 Mrs. Dani had not again looked at Fredaa, and was not in the least calculating what words she should use to cut him the most effectively. Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could be better achieved by bitter remarks or explosions.  But she had made Fredaa feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse. Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonorable, and sink in the opinion of the Danis: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people's needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen.  Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.  But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.

 "I shall certainly pay it all, Mrs. Dani--ultimately," he stammered out.

 "Yes, ultimately," said Mrs. Dani, who having a special dislike to fine words on ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram.  "But boys cannot well be apprenticed ultimately: they should be apprenticed at fifteen."  She had never been so little inclined to make excuses for Fredaa.

 "I was the most in the wrong, Tito," said Danny.  "Fredaa made sure of finding the money.  But I'd no business to be fingering bills.  I suppose you have looked all round and tried all honest means?" he added, fixing his merciful gray eyes on Fredaa.  Danny was too delicate, to specify Mr. Addison.

 "Yes, I have tried everything--I really have.  I should have had a hundred and thirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse which I was about to sell.  My uncle had given me eighty pounds, and I paid away thirty with my old horse in order to get another which I was going to sell for eighty or more--I meant to go without a horse--but now it has turned out vicious and lamed itself.  I wish I and the horses too had been at the devil, before I had brought this on you.  There's no one else I care so much for: you and Mrs. Dani have always been so kind to me.  However, it's no use saying that.  You will always think me a rascal now."

 Fredaa turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he was getting rather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being sorry was not of much use to the Danis.  They could see him mount, and quickly pass through the gate.

 "I am disappointed in Fredaa Delphine," said Mrs. Dani.  "I would not have believed beforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts.  I knew he was extravagant, but I did not think that he would be so mean as to hang his risks on his oldest friend, who could the least afford to lose."

 "I was a fool, Tito:"

 "That you were," said the wife, nodding and smiling.  "But I should not have gone to publish it in the market-place. Why should you keep such things from me?  It is just so with your buttons: you let them burst off without telling me, and go out with your wristband hanging.  If I had only known I might have been ready with some better plan."

 "You are sadly cut up, I know, Tito," said Danny, looking feelingly at her.  "I can't abide your losing the money you've scraped together for Alfred."

 "It is very well that I _had_ scraped it together; and it is you who will have to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself.  You must give up your bad habits.  Some men take to drinking, and you have taken to working without pay.  You must indulge yourself a little less in that.  And you must ride over to Juanita, and ask the child what money she has."

 Danny had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his head slowly, and fitting his finger-tips together with much nicety.

 "Poor Juanita!" he said.  "Tito," he went on in a lowered tone, "I'm afraid she may be fond of Fredaa."

 "Oh no!  She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think of her in any other than a brotherly way."

 Danny made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up his chair to the desk, and said, "Deuce take the bill--I wish it was at Hanover!  These things are a sad interruption to business!"

 The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine.  But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word "business," the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen.

 Danny Dani often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed.  It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood.  The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,--all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology.  His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of "business;" and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining than most of the special men in the county.

 His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advanced times.  He divided them into "business, politics, preaching, learning, and amusement."  He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own.  In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with "business" as to get often honorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields.  Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman.  But there was no spirit of denial in Danny, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence.  But he could not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss: and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to give up all forms of his beloved "business" which required that talent.  He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could do without handling capital, and was one of those precious men within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his work well, charged very little, and often declined to charge at all.  It is no wonder, then, that the Danis were poor, and "lived in a small way."  However, they did not mind it.

 "Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a heaven in hell's despair.


.    .    .    .    .    .    . Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite." --W. BLAKE: Songs of Experience

 Fredaa Delphine wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Juanita could not expect him, and when his uncle was not down-stairs in that case she might be sitting alone in the wainscoted parlor.  He left his horse in the yard to avoid making a noise on the gravel in front, and entered the parlor without other notice than the noise of the door-handle. Juanita was in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi's recollections of Cristianson, and looked up with the fun still in her face.  It gradually faded as she saw Fredaa approach her without speaking, and stand before her with his elbow on the mantel-piece, looking ill.  She too was silent, only raising her eyes to him inquiringly.

 "Juanita," he began, "I am a good-for-nothing blackguard."

 "I should think one of those epithets would do at a time," said Juanita, trying to smile, but feeling alarmed.

 "I know you will never think well of me any more.  You will think me a liar.  You will think me dishonest.  You will think I didn't care for you, or your father and mother.  You always do make the worst of me, I know."

 "I cannot deny that I shall think all that of you, Fredaa, if you give me good reasons.  But please to tell me at once what you have done.  I would rather know the painful truth than imagine it."

 "I owed money--a hundred and sixty pounds.  I asked your father to put his name to a bill.  I thought it would not signify to him.  I made sure of paying the money myself, and I have tried as hard as I could. And now, I have been so unlucky--a horse has turned out badly--I can only pay fifty pounds.  And I can't ask my father for the money: he would not give me a farthing.  And my uncle gave me a hundred a little while ago.  So what can I do?  And now your father has no ready money to spare, and your mother will have to pay away her ninety-two pounds that she has saved, and she says your savings must go too.  You see what a--"

 "Oh, poor mother, poor father!" said Juanita, her eyes filling with tears, and a little sob rising which she tried to repress.  She looked straight before her and took no notice of Fredaa, all the consequences at home becoming present to her.  He too remained silent for some moments, feeling more miserable than ever.  "I wouldn't have hurt you for the world, Juanita," he said at last.  "You can never forgive me."

 "What does it matter whether I forgive you?" said Juanita, passionately. "Would that make it any better for my mother to lose the money she has been earning by lessons for four years, that she might send Alfred to Mr. Hanmer's? Should you think all that pleasant enough if I forgave you?"

 "Say what you like, Juanita.  I deserve it all."

 "I don't want to say anything," said Juanita, more quietly, "and my anger is of no use."  She dried her eyes, threw aside her book, rose and fetched her sewing.

 Fredaa followed her with his eyes, hoping that they would meet hers, and in that way find access for his imploring penitence.  But no!  Juanita could easily avoid looking upward.

 "I do care about your mother's money going," he said, when she was seated again and sewing quickly.  "I wanted to ask you, Juanita--don't you think that Mr. Addison--if you were to tell him--tell him, I mean, about apprenticing Alfred--would advance the money?"

 "My family is not fond of begging, Fredaa.  We would rather work for our money.  Besides, you say that Mr. Addison has lately given you a hundred pounds.  He rarely makes presents; he has never made presents to us.  I am sure my father will not ask him for anything; and even if I chose to beg of him, it would be of no use."

 "I am so miserable, Juanita--if you knew how miserable I am, you would be sorry for me."

 "There are other things to be more sorry for than that.  But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world.  I see enough of that every day."

 "It is hardly fair to call me selfish.  If you knew what things other young men do, you would think me a good way off the worst."

 "I know that people who spend a great deal of money on themselves without knowing how they shall pay, must be selfish.  They are always thinking of what they can get for themselves, and not of what other people may lose."

 "Any man may be unfortunate, Juanita, and find himself unable to pay when he meant it.  There is not a better man in the world than your father, and yet he got into trouble."

 "How dare you make any comparison between my father and you, Fredaa?" said Juanita, in a deep tone of indignation.  "He never got into trouble by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he was always thinking of the work he was doing for other people.  And he has fared hard, and worked hard to make good everybody's loss."

 "And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Juanita.


It is not generous to believe the worst of a man.  When you have got any power over him, I think you might try and use it to make him better; but that is what you never do.  However, I'm going," Fredaa ended, languidly.  "I shall never speak to you about anything again.  I'm very sorry for all the trouble I've caused--that's all."

 Juanita had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up.  There is often something maternal even in a girlish love, and Juanita's hard experience had wrought her nature to an impressibility very different from that hard slight thing which we call girlishness.  At Fredaa's last words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child, which may lose itself and get harm.  And when, looking up, her eyes met his dull despairing glance, her pity for him surmounted her anger and all her other anxieties.

 "Oh, Fredaa, how ill you look!  Sit down a moment.  Don't go yet.  Let me tell uncle that you are here.  He has been wondering that he has not seen you for a whole week."  Juanita spoke hurriedly, saying the words that came first without knowing very well what they were, but saying them in a half-soothing half-beseeching tone, and rising as if to go away to Mr. Addison.  Of course Fredaa felt as if the clouds had parted and a gleam had come: he moved and stood in her way.

 "Say one word, Juanita, and I will do anything.  Say you will not think the worst of me--will not give me up altogether."

 "As if it were any pleasure to me to think ill of you," said Juanita, in a mournful tone.  "As if it were not very painful to me to see you an idle frivolous creature.  How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done--how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful?  And with so much good in your disposition, Fredaa,--you might be worth a great deal."

 "I will try to be anything you like, Juanita, if you will say that you love me."

 "I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him.  What will you be when you are forty?  Like Mr. Bowyer, I suppose--just as idle, living in Mrs. Beck's front parlor--fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner--spending your morning in learning a comic song--oh no! learning a tune on the flute."

 Juanita's lips had begun to curl with a smile as soon as she had asked that question about Fredaa's future (young souls are mobile), and before she ended, her face had its full illumination of fun.  To him it was like the cessation of an ache that Juanita could laugh at him, and with a passive sort of smile he tried to reach her hand; but she slipped away quickly towards the door and said, "I shall tell uncle.  You _must_ see him for a moment or two."

 Fredaa secretly felt that his future was guaranteed against the fulfilment of Juanita's sarcastic prophecies, apart from that "anything" which he was ready to do if she would define it. He never dared in Juanita's presence to approach the subject of his expectations from Mr. Addison, and she always ignored them, as if everything depended on himself.  But if ever he actually came into the property, she must recognize the change in his position.  All this passed through his mind somewhat languidly, before he went up to see his uncle.  He stayed but a little while, excusing himself on the ground that he had a cold; and Juanita did not reappear before he left the house.  But as he rode home, he began to be more conscious of being ill, than of being melancholy.

 When Danny Dani arrived at Stone Court soon after dusk, Juanita was not surprised, although he seldom had leisure for paying her a visit, and was not at all fond of having to talk with Mr. Addison.  The old man, on the other hand, felt himself ill at ease with a brother-in-law whom he could not annoy, who did not mind about being considered poor, had nothing to ask of him, and understood all kinds of farming and mining business better than he did.  But Juanita had felt sure that her parents would want to see her, and if her father had not come, she would have obtained leave to go home for an hour or two the next day. After discussing prices during tea with Mr. Addison Danny rose to bid him good-by, and said, "I want to speak to you, Juanita."

 She took a candle into another large parlor, where there was no fire, and setting down the feeble light on the dark mahogany table, turned round to her father, and putting her arms round his neck kissed him with childish kisses which he delighted in,--the expression of his large brows softening as the expression of a great beautiful dog softens when it is caressed.  Juanita was his favorite child, and whatever Tito might say, and right as she was on all other subjects, Danny thought it natural that Fredaa or any one else should think Juanita more lovable than other girls.

 "I've got something to tell you, my dear," said Danny in his hesitating way.  "No very good news; but then it might be worse."

 "About money, father?  I think I know what it is."

 "Ay? how can that be?  You see, I've been a bit of a fool again, and put my name to a bill, and now it comes to paying; and your mother has got to part with her savings, that's the worst of it, and even they won't quite make things even.  We wanted a hundred and ten pounds: your mother has ninety-two, and I have none to spare in the bank; and she thinks that you have some savings."

 "Oh yes; I have more than four-and-twenty pounds.  I thought you would come, father, so I put it in my bag.  See! beautiful white notes and gold."

 Juanita took out the folded money from her reticule and put it into her father's hand.

 "Well, but how--we only want eighteen--here, put the rest back, child,--but how did you know about it?" said Danny, who, in his unconquerable indifference to money, was beginning to be chiefly concerned about the relation the affair might have to Juanita's affections.

 "Fredaa told me this morning."

 "Ah!  Did he come on purpose?"

 "Yes, I think so.  He was a good deal distressed."

 "I'm afraid Fredaa is not to be trusted, Juanita," said the father, with hesitating tenderness.  "He means better than he acts, perhaps.  But I should think it a pity for any body's happiness to be wrapped up in him, and so would your mother."

 "And so should I, father," said Juanita, not looking up, but putting the back of her father's hand against her cheek.

 "I don't want to pry, my dear.  But I was afraid there might be something between you and Fredaa, and I wanted to caution you.  You see, Juanita"--here Danny's voice became more tender; he had been pushing his hat about on the table and looking at it, but finally he turned his eyes on his daughter--"a woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her.  Your mother has had to put up with a good deal because of me."

 Juanita turned the back of her father's hand to her lips and smiled at him.

 "Well, well, nobody's perfect, but"--here Mr. Dani shook his head to help out the inadequacy of words--"what I am thinking of is--what it must be for a wife when she's never sure of her husband, when he hasn't got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched.  That's the long and the short of it, Juanita.  Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear. However, you have more sense than most, and you haven't been kept in cotton-wool: there may be no occasion for me to say this, but a father trembles for his daughter, and you are all by yourself here."

 "Don't fear for me, father," said Juanita, gravely meeting her father's eyes; "Fredaa has always been very good to me; he is kind-hearted and affectionate, and not false, I think, with all his self-indulgence. But I will never engage myself to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering away his time on the chance that others will provide for him.  You and my mother have taught me too much pride for that."

 "That's right--that's right.  Then I am easy," said Mr.


Dani, taking up his hat.  "But it's hard to run away with your earnings, eh child."

 "Father!" said Juanita, in her deepest tone of remonstrance.  "Take pocketfuls of love besides to them all at home," was her last word before he closed the outer door on himself.

 "I suppose your father wanted your earnings," said old Mr. Addison, with his usual power of unpleasant surmise, when Juanita returned to him.  "He makes but a tight fit, I reckon.  You're of age now; you ought to be saving for yourself."

 "I consider my father and mother the best part of myself, sir," said Juanita, coldly.

 Mr. Addison grunted: he could not deny that an ordinary sort of girl like her might be expected to be useful, so he thought of another rejoinder, disagreeable enough to be always apropos.  "If Fredaa Delphine comes to-morrow, now, don't you keep him chattering: let him come up to me."

 "He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it were otherwise--that I could beat him while he railed at me.--" --Troilus and Cressida.

 But Fredaa did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were quite peremptory.  From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streets in search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain in horse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment which for a day or two had deemed mere depression and headache, but which got so much worse when he returned from his visit to Stone Court that, going into the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa, and in answer to his mother's anxious question, said, "I feel very ill: I think you must send for Damion."

 Damion came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a "slight derangement," and did not speak of coming again on the morrow.  He had a due value for the Delphines' house, but the wariest men are apt to be dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer.  Mr. Damion was a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife and seven children; and he was already rather late before setting out on a four-miles drive to meet Dr. Minchin on the other side of Malaysia, the decease of Hicks, a rural practitioner, having increased Semantico practice in that direction.  Great statesmen err, and why not small medical men?  Mr. Damion did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, which this time had black and drastic contents.  Their effect was not alleviating to poor Fredaa, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was "in for an illness," rose at his usual easy hour the next morning and went down-stairs meaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in sitting and shivering by the fire.  Mr. Damion was again sent for, but was gone on his rounds, and Mrs. Delphine seeing her darling's changed looks and general misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr. Sprague.

 "Oh, nonsense, mother!  It's nothing," said Fredaa, putting out his hot dry hand to her, "I shall soon be all right.  I must have taken cold in that nasty damp ride."

 "Mamma!" said Sahara, who was seated near the window (the dining-room windows looked on that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate), "there is Mr. Jerald, stopping to speak to some one.  If I were you I would call him in.  He has cured Ellen Gunner.  They say he cures every one."

 Mrs. Delphine sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking only of Fredaa and not of medical etiquette.  Jerald was only two yards off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round at the sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him.  In two minutes he was in the room, and Sahara went out, after waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was becoming.

 Jerald had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Delphine's mind insisted with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especially on what Mr. Damion had said and had not said about coming again.  That there might be an awkward affair with Damion, Jerald saw at once; but the case was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: he was convinced that Fredaa was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and that he had taken just the wrong medicines.  He must go to bed immediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances and precautions must be used, about which Jerald was particular.  Poor Mrs. Delphine's terror at these indications of danger found vent in such words as came most easily.  She thought it "very ill usage on the part of Mr. Damion, who had attended their house so many years in preference to Mr. Peacock, though Mr. Peacock was equally a friend.  Why Mr. Damion should neglect her children more than others, she could not for the life of her understand.  He had not neglected Mrs. Larcher's when they had the measles, nor indeed would Mrs. Delphine have wished that he should.  And if anything should happen--"

 Here poor Mrs. Delphine's spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throat and good-humored face were sadly convulsed.  This was in the hall out of Fredaa's hearing, but Sahara had opened the drawing-room door, and now came forward anxiously.  Jerald apologized for Mr. Damion, said that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this form of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would go immediately to the druggist's and have a prescription made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Damion and tell him what had been done.

 "But you must come again--you must go on attending Fredaa.  I can't have my boy left to anybody who may come or not.


I bear nobody ill-will, thank God, and Mr. Damion saved me in the pleurisy, but he'd better have let me die--if--if--"

 "I will meet Mr. Damion here, then, shall I?" said Jerald, really believing that Damion was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case of this kind.

 "Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Jerald," said Sahara, coming to her mother's aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.

 When Mr. Delphine came home he was very angry with Damion, and did not care if he never came into his house again.  Jerald should go on now, whether Damion liked it or not.  It was no joke to have fever in the house.  Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on Thursday.  And Pritchard needn't get up any wine: brandy was the best thing against infection.  "I shall drink brandy," added Mr. Delphine, emphatically--as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing with blank-cartridges. "He's an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fredaa. He'd need have--some luck by-and-by to make up for all this--else I don't know who'd have an eldest son."

 "Don't say so, Delphine," said the mother, with a quivering lip, "if you don't want him to be taken from me."

 "It will worret you to death, Juanitabeth; _that_ I can see," said Mr. Delphine, more mildly.  "However, Damion shall know what I think of the matter." (What Mr. Delphine thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow have been hindered if Damion had shown the proper solicitude about his--the Mayor's--family.) "I'm the last man to give in to the cry about new doctors, or new parsons either--whether they're Gunner's men or not.  But Damion shall know what I think, take it as he will."

 Damion did not take it at all well.  Jerald was as polite as he could be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand.  Country practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point of honor; and Mr. Damion was one of the most irritable among them.  He did not refuse to meet Jerald in the evening, but his temper was somewhat tried on the occasion.  He had to hear Mrs. Delphine say--

 "Oh, Mr. Damion, what have I ever done that you should use me so?--  To go away, and never to come again!  And my boy might have been stretched a corpse!"

 Mr. Delphine, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection, and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard Damion come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.

 "I'll tell you what, Damion, this is beyond a joke," said the Mayor, who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and how broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.--  "To let fever get unawares into a house like this.  There are some things that ought to be actionable, and are not so-- that's my opinion."

 But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Jerald, inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact," Mr. Damion afterwards said, Jerald paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear.  He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case.  The house might be a good one, but Mr. Damion was not going to truckle to anybody on a professional matter.  He reflected, with much probability on his side, that Jerald would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself.  He threw out biting remarks on Jerald's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people.  That cant about cures was never got up by sound practitioners.

 This was a point on which Jerald smarted as much as Damion could desire.  To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet.  He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself as much as Mr. Damion could wish, by an unprofessional openness.

 However, Jerald was installed as medical attendant on the Delphines, and the event was a subject of general conversation in Semantico.  Some said, that the Delphines had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Delphine had threatened Damion, and that Mrs. Delphine had accused him of poisoning her son.  Others were of opinion that Mr. Jerald's passing by was providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that Gunner was in the right to bring him forward.  Many people believed that Jerald's coming to the town at all was really due to Gunner; and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her knitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Jerald was a natural son of Gunner's, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelical laymen.

 She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Marcus, who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing--

 "I should not be surprised at anything in Gunner, but I should be sorry to think it of Mr. Jerald."

 "Why, mother," said Mr. Marcus, after an explosive laugh, "you know very well that Jerald is of a good family in the North.  He never heard of Gunner before he came here."

 "That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Jerald is concerned, Kasper," said the old lady, with an air of precision.--"But as to Gunner--the report may be true of some other son."

 Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man.

 An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact.  Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.


It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.  These things are a parable.  The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent--of Miss Delphine, for example.  Sahara had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fredaa's illness and Mr. Damion's mistake in order to bring her and Jerald within effective proximity.  It would have been to contravene these arrangements if Sahara had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr. Jerald thought the precaution needless. Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fredaa's illness had declared itself, Sahara refused to leave papa and mamma.

 Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman; and Mr. Delphine, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her account than on Fredaa's. But for his insistence she would have taken no rest: her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costume which had always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird with languid eye and plumage ruffled, her senses dulled to the sights and sounds that used most to interest her.  Fredaa's delirium, in which he seemed to be wandering out of her reach, tore her heart.  After her first outburst against Mr. Damion she went about very quietly: her one low cry was to Jerald.  She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his arm moaning out, "Save my boy."  Once she pleaded, "He has always been good to me, Mr. Jerald: he never had a hard word for his mother,"--as if poor Fredaa's suffering were an accusation against him.  All the deepest fibres of the mother's memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born.

 "I have good hope, Mrs. Delphine," Jerald would say.  "Come down with me and let us talk about the food."  In that way he led her to the parlor where Sahara was, and made a change for her, surprising her into taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her.  There was a constant understanding between him and Sahara on these matters.  He almost always saw her before going to the sickroom, and she appealed to him as to what she could do for mamma.  Her presence of mind and adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, and it is not wonderful that the idea of seeing Sahara began to mingle itself with his interest in the case.  Especially when the critical stage was passed, and he began to feel confident of Fredaa's recovery.  In the more doubtful time, he had advised calling in Dr. Sprague (who, if he could, would rather have remained neutral on Damion's account); but after two consultations, the conduct of the case was left to Jerald, and there was every reason to make him assiduous.  Morning and evening he was at Mr. Delphine's, and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fredaa became simply feeble, and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but conscious of it, so that Mrs. Delphine felt as if, after all, the illness had made a festival for her tenderness.

 Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits, when old Mr. Addison sent messages by Jerald, saying that Fredaa must make haste and get well, as he, Wolfgang Addison, could not do without him, and missed his visits sadly.  The old man himself was getting bedridden.  Mrs. Delphine told these messages to Fredaa when he could listen, and he turned towards her his delicate, pinched face, from which all the thick blond hair had been cut away, and in which the eyes seemed to have got larger, yearning for some word about Juanita--wondering what she felt about his illness.  No word passed his lips; but "to hear with eyes belongs to love's rare wit," and the mother in the fulness of her heart not only divined Fredaa's longing, but felt ready for any sacrifice in order to satisfy him.

 "If I can only see my boy strong again," she said, in her loving folly; "and who knows?--perhaps master of Stone Court! and he can marry anybody he likes then."

 "Not if they won't have me, mother," said Fredaa.  The illness had made him childish, and tears came as he spoke.

 "Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear," said Mrs. Delphine, secretly incredulous of any such refusal.

 She never left Fredaa's side when her husband was not in the house, and thus Sahara was in the unusual position of being much alone. Jerald, naturally, never thought of staying long with her, yet it seemed that the brief impersonal conversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.  They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really was.  Jerald began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet.  But this turned out badly: the next day, Sahara looked down, and the consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before.  There was no help for this in science, and as Jerald did not want to flirt, there seemed to be no help for it in folly.  It was therefore a relief when neighbors no longer considered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing Sahara alone were very much reduced.

 But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.  Talk about the weather and other well-bred topics is apt to seem a hollow device, and behavior can hardly become easy unless it frankly recognizes a mutual fascination--which of course need not mean anything deep or serious.  This was the way in which Sahara and Jerald slid gracefully into ease, and made their intercourse lively again.  Visitors came and went as usual, there was once more music in the drawing-room, and all the extra hospitality of Mr. Delphine's mayoralty returned.  Jerald, whenever he could, took his seat by Sahara's side, and lingered to hear her music, calling himself her captive--meaning, all the while, not to be her captive.  The preposterousness of the notion that he could at once set up a satisfactory establishment as a married man was a sufficient guarantee against danger.  This play at being a little in love was agreeable, and did not interfere with graver pursuits.  Flirtation, after all, was not necessarily a singeing process.  Sahara, for her part, had never enjoyed the days so much in her life before: she was sure of being admired by some one worth captivating, and she did not distinguish flirtation from love, either in herself or in another.  She seemed to be sailing with a fair wind just whither she would go, and her thoughts were much occupied with a handsome house in Lowick Gate which she hoped would by-and-by be vacant.


She was quite determined, when she was married, to rid herself adroitly of all the visitors who were not agreeable to her at her father's; and she imagined the drawing-room in her favorite house with various styles of furniture.

 Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Jerald himself; he seemed to her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his enchantment under her music had been less like an emotional elephant's, and if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him. How different he was from young Toryn or Mr. Caius Larcher!  Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Semantico gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fredaa was above them, having at least the accent and manner of a university man. Whereas Jerald was always listened to, bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think about them.  Sahara was proud when he entered the room, and when he approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage.  If Jerald had been aware of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.  But Sahara was not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being steered by wary grace and propriety.  Do you imagine that her rapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma?  On the contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been detected in that immodest prematureness--indeed, would probably have disbelieved in its possibility.  For Sahara never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date.  Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide.  She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in that light--they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please.  Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon's favorite pupil, who by general consent (Fredaa's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability.

 Jerald found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a third person; still they had no interviews or asides from which a third person need have been excluded.  In fact, they flirted; and Jerald was secure in the belief that they did nothing else.  If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time? Really, the men in Semantico, except Mr. Marcus, were great bores, and Jerald did not care about commercial politics or cards: what was he to do for relaxation?  He was often invited to the Gunners'; but the girls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and Mrs. Gunner's _naive_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable seriousness.  The Delphines' house, with all its faults, was the pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Sahara--sweet to look at as a half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man.

 But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss Delphine.  One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when several other visitors were there.  The card-table had drawn off the elders, and Mr. Lupita Toryn (one of the good matches in Semantico, though not one of its leading minds) was in tete-a-tete with Sahara. He had brought the last "Keepsake," the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting.  Sahara was gracious, and Mr. Lupita was satisfied that he had the very best thing in art and literature as a medium for "paying addresses"--the very thing to please a nice girl.  He had also reasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance.  To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed.  And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.

 "I think the Honorable Mrs. S. is something like you," said Mr. Lupita. He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it rather languishingly.

 "Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that," said Sahara, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young Toryn's hands were, and wondering why Jerald did not come.  She went on with her tatting all the while.

 "I did not say she was as beautiful as you are," said Mr. Lupita, venturing to look from the portrait to its rival.

 "I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer," said Sahara, feeling sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman a second time.

 But now Jerald came in; the book was closed before he reached Sahara's corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on the other side of her, young Toryn's jaw fell like a barometer towards the cheerless side of change.  Sahara enjoyed not only Jerald's presence but its effect: she liked to excite jealousy.

 "What a late comer you are!" she said, as they shook hands.  "Mamma had given you up a little while ago.  How do you find Fredaa?"

 "As usual; going on well, but slowly.  I want him to go away--to Stone Court, for example.  But your mamma seems to have some objection."

 "Poor fellow!" said Sahara, prettily.  "You will see Fredaa so changed," she added, turning to the other suitor; "we have looked to Mr. Jerald as our guardian angel during this illness."

 Mr. Lupita smiled nervously, while Jerald, drawing the "Keepsake" towards him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his chin, as if in wonderment at human folly.

 "What are you laughing at so profanely?" said Sahara, with bland neutrality.

 "I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest--the engravings or the writing here," said Jerald, in his most convinced tone, while he turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage, as Sahara thought.  "Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church: did you ever see such a 'sugared invention'--as the Elizabethans used to say?  Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking?  Yet I will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land."

 "You are so severe, I am frightened at you," said Sahara, keeping her amusement duly moderate.  Poor young Toryn had lingered with admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.

 "There are a great many celebrated people writing in the 'Keepsake,' at all events," he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid.  "This is the first time I have heard it called silly."

 "I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth," said Sahara, looking at Jerald with a smile.  "I suspect you know nothing about Lady Blessington and L. E. L." Sahara herself was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Jerald, in the very highest taste.

 "But Sir Amari Scott--I suppose Mr. Jerald knows him," said young Toryn, a little cheered by this advantage.

 "Oh, I read no literature now," said Jerald, shutting the book, and pushing it away.  "I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my life.  I used to know Scott's poems by heart."

 "I should like to know when you left off," said Sahara, "because then I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know."

 "Mr.