The door closed in the draught, the drawing-room door opened, and Mr. Laudersdale stepped out, having been awaiting their return.  Mr. Raleigh caught the flash of Marguerite’s eye and the crimson of her cheek, as she sprang forward up the stairs and out of sight.

The family did not breakfast together the next day, as politeness chooses to call the first hour after a ball, and Mr. Raleigh was making some arrangements preliminary to his departure, in his own apartments, at about the hour of noon.  The rooms which he had formerly occupied Mrs. McLean had always kept closed, in a possibility of his return, and he had found himself installed in them upon his arrival.  The library was today rather a melancholy room:  the great book-cases did not enliven it; the grand-piano, with its old dark polish, seemed like a coffin, the sarcophagus of unrisen music; the oak panelling had absorbed a richer hue with the years than once it wore; the portrait of his mother seemed farther withdrawn from sight and air; Antinoues took a tawnier tint in his long reverie.  The Summer, past her height, sent a sad beam, the signal of decay, through the half-open shutters, and it lay wearily on the man who sat by the long table, and made more sombre yet the faded carpet and cumbrous chair.

There was a tap on the door.  Mr. Raleigh rose and opened it, and invited Mr. Laudersdale in.  The latter gentleman complied, took the chair resigned by the other, but after a few words became quiet.  Mr. Raleigh made one or two attempts at conversation, then, seeing silence to be his visitor’s whim, suffered him to indulge it, and himself continued his writing.  Indeed, the peculiar relations existing between these men made much conversation difficult.  Mr. Laudersdale sat with his eyes upon the floor for several minutes, and his countenance wrapped in thought.  Rising, with his hands behind him, he walked up and down the long room, still without speaking.

“Can I be of service to you, Sir?” asked the other, after observing him.

“Yes, Mr. Raleigh, I am led to think you can,”—­still pacing up and down, and vouchsafing no further information.

At last, the monotonous movement ended, Mr. Laudersdale stood at the window, intercepting the sunshine, and examined some memoranda.

“Yes, Mr. Raleigh,” he resumed, with all his courtly manner, upon close of the examination, “I am in hopes that you may assist me in a singular dilemma.”

“I shall be very glad to do so.”

“Thank you.  This is the affair.  About a year ago, being unable to make my usual visit to my daughter and her grandmother, I sent there in my place our head clerk, young Heath, to effect the few transactions, and also to take a month’s recreation,—­for we were all overworked and exhausted by the crisis.  The first thing he proceeded to do was to fall in love with my daughter.  Of course he did not mention this occurrence to me, on his return.  When my