“Do look after Mr. Rutherford a little, there’s a dear, good creature,” whispered Mrs. Archer confidentially to Miss Nugent.  “He is dreadfully tiresome, to be sure, but John thinks the world of him, you know, and it would not exactly do to leave him alone all the time.  I wish him to receive every attention while he is in the house, of course; but as for sitting for hours at a time with him in that stuffy little library—­just in the height of the season, too—­why, I cannot think of doing it.  If you will just go and sit with him sometimes, and read to him a little, it will be an absolute charity to me.  I’ll see that Alice and Emily do not get into any mischief.”

Which, considering that the young ladies in question were, one twelve, the other ten years of age, and both much addicted to flirtation and dancing the “German,” was rather a rash promise and inconsiderately made.

So Miss Nugent was definitely installed as reader and garde malade in general, and Clement Rutherford soon learned to await her coming with impatience and to welcome her with delight.  All his life long will he remember those summer days, when her voice and the low plash of the far-off ocean waves wove themselves together into music as she read, and when the blue splendors of her lustrous eyes lent a new meaning to the poet’s story as it flowed in melodious verses from her lips.  Then came a day when the book was laid aside, and the impassioned utterances of poetry gave place to the more prosaic but not less fervent accents of a newly-awakened passion.  Cold, silent and morose as Clement Rutherford had always been, it had so happened that but few women had ever attempted to attract him, notwithstanding his wealth and social position; and the interested motives of those few had been so apparent that he had been repelled and disgusted, instead of being fascinated, by their wiles; so that Miss Nugent’s grace and beauty and syren charms proved all too potent for his unoccupied though icy heart to resist; and thus it chanced that the day before Mr. Rutherford left Newport he astonished his hostess by requesting a private interview with her, and therein announcing his engagement to her governess.

“You could have knocked me down with a feather,” Mrs. Archer said afterward to an intimate friend.  “I never should have suspected that such a quiet, stupid man as he was would fall in love in that ridiculous kind of a way.  Good gracious! how indignant old Mrs. Rutherford will be! and I shall be blamed for the whole affair, no doubt.  I wish John had never brought the man here—­I never did like him; and then, too, it is so provoking to lose Miss Nugent just now, while we are at Newport.  Of course I can find no one to replace her till we return to New York.  Well, I always was an unlucky little woman.”