from her father, the two sisters being the only children of Schuyler Van Vleyden.  She was a soured, morose old maid, and probably saw some congeniality of disposition in her eldest nephew which caused her to single him out as her heir.  After he attained to years of manhood, he always manifested a decided antipathy to ladies’ society, and was generally looked upon as a confirmed old bachelor; so that when he announced to his mother the fact of his engagement to Mrs. Archer’s pretty governess, Miss Nugent, her distress of mind was fully equaled by her astonishment.  The match met with her strongest disapproval, as was to have been expected; for it was hardly probable that she, the oldest surviving representative of the old Knickerbocker family the Van Vleydens, an acknowledged leader of society by the triple right of wealth, birth and intellect, should be inclined to welcome very warmly as a daughter-in-law the penniless beauty who had been occupied for some months past in teaching Mrs. Archer’s little daughters the rudiments of French and music.  Moreover, the investigations and inquiries respecting the young lady’s origin which she had at once caused to be instituted on hearing of her son’s engagement, had revealed a state of affairs which had placed Miss Nugent in a very unenviable light.  Her parents were well born, though poor.  She was the daughter of a curate in the North of England, who had lost his young wife by heart disease when Marion was but a few months old, and two years later Mr. Nugent died of consumption, leaving his little daughter to the care of his unmarried and elderly brother, the Reverend Walter Nugent, who, though the living he held was but a small one, contrived to rear and educate his niece as his own child.  He had only allowed her to leave him and become a governess on the assurance of the village physician that her health was seriously impaired, and that a sea voyage and complete change of scene would prove the best and surest of restoratives.  But the pained though manly tone of the letter in which he replied to Mrs. Rutherford’s inquiries had prepossessed that warm-hearted, high-minded lady most strongly against her future daughter-in-law.  “I loved Marion always as though she were my own child,” wrote Mr. Nugent, “and I cannot but look upon her total neglect of me since her arrival in America as being wholly inexcusable.  She has never even written me one line since her departure, and I learned of her safe arrival only by the newspapers.  I can but infer from her obstinate and persistent silence that she wishes to sever all ties between herself and me, and I have resigned myself to the prospect of a lonely and cheerless old age.  I trust that she may be happy in the brilliant marriage which, you say, she is about to make, and I can assure her that her old uncle will never disturb her in her new prosperity.”

Mrs. Rutherford had one long, stormy interview with her eldest son, and learning therein that his determination to marry Miss Nugent was fixed and unalterable, she had with commendable wisdom accepted the situation, and resolved to so order the conduct of herself and her relatives as to give the scandalous world no room for that contemptuous pity and abundant gossip which an open rupture between herself and her son would doubtless have occasioned.