A week previously, when, to repay the civilities of their friends in the neighboring city, Mrs. McLean had made a little fancy-party, Helen, appearing as Champagne, all in rosy gauzes with a veiling foam of dropping silver lace, had begged Mrs. Laudersdale to give her prominence by dressing for Port; and accordingly that lady had arrayed herself in velvet, out of which her shoulders rose like snow, and whose rich duskiness made her perfect pallor more apparent, while its sumptuous body of color was sprinkled with glittering crystal drops and coruscations; and wreathing her forehead with crisp vine-leaves and tendrils, she had bunched together in intricate splendor all the amethysts, carbuncles, garnets, and rubies in the house, for grape-clusters at the ear, till she seemed, with her smile and her sunshine, the express and incarnate spirit of vintage.  To-night, stripped of its sparkling drops, she wore the same dress, and in her hair a wreath of fresh white roses.  Behind her descended a tall and stately gentleman.  She swept forward.  “Mr. Raleigh,” she murmured, while her eyes diffused their gloom and fell, “let me introduce you to my husband!”

The blow had come previously.  Mr. Raleigh bowed almost to the ground, without a word, then looked up and offered his hand.  Mr. Laudersdale comprehended the whole matter at a heartbeat, and took it.  Then they moved on toward other friends, whom, while waiting for knowledge of his wife’s return from her walk, Mr. Laudersdale had not seen.  Mr. Raleigh went in search of Capua, and ere long reappeared.

It grew quite dark; the candles were lighted.  Rite slipped in, and, after having flown about like a thistle-down for a while, mounted a chair and put her arms about her mother’s shoulders.  Then Mr. Raleigh, sitting silently on a sofa, attracted her, and shortly afterward she had curled herself beside him and fallen asleep with her head upon his knee; otherwise he did not touch her.  Mrs. Laudersdale stood by an open casement; the servant who had carried her note came up the lawn and spoke to her from without.  There was no one in the house, and he had left it on the library-table.  The pressure of those tender little arms was yet warm about the mother’s neck; she glanced sidelong at the sleeping child.  “He shall never see that note!” she murmured, and slipped through the casement.

Accustomed to all rash and intrepid adventure during this summer, it was nothing for her to unmoor a boat, enter it, and lift the oars, not pausing to observe that it was the Arrow.  Just then, however, a little wind ruffled down and shook the sail, a wind not quite favorable, but in which she could tack across and back; she drew in the oars, put to the proof all her new boat-craft, and recklessly dashed through the dark element that curled and seethed about her.  She had to make but two tacks in that hour’s impetuous progress, before the house rose, as it had frequently done before, glooming at but a few rods’ distance,