She trembled and whispered painfully: 

“No, Harold, no—­I dare not.  Oh, Harold, bid him forget me.”

“It is better that you should not see him.  Farewell! be brave.  We are good friends, remember.  Farewell, dear girl.”

Beverly had been waiting with the carriage, and as the time was short, he called to Harold.  Arthur, who stood at the carriage wheel, simply raised his hat to Oriana, as if in a parting salute.  He would have given his right hand to have pressed hers for a moment; but his will was iron, and he did not once look back as the carriage whirled away.

CHAPTER X.

In the drawing-room of an elegant mansion in a fashionable quarter of the city of New York, toward the close of April, a social party were assembled, distributed mostly in small conversational groups.  The head of the establishment, a pompous, well-to-do merchant, stout, short, and baldheaded, and evidently well satisfied with himself and his position in society, was vehemently expressing his opinions upon the affairs of the nation to an attentive audience of two or three elderly business men, with a ponderous earnestness that proved him, in his own estimation, as much au fait in political affairs as in the routine of his counting-room.  An individual of middle age, a man of the world, apparently, who was seated at a side-table, carelessly glancing over a book of engravings, was the only one who occasionally exasperated the pompous gentleman with contradictions or ill-timed interruptions.

“The government must be sustained,” said the stout gentleman, “and we, the merchants of the North, will do it.  It is money, sir, money,” he continued, unconsciously rattling the coin in his breeches pocket, “that settles every question at the present day, and our money will bring these beggarly rebels to their senses.  They can’t do without us, sir.  They would be ruined in six months, if shut out from commercial intercourse with the North.”

“How long before you would be ruined by the operations of the same cause?” inquired the individual at the side-table.

“Sir, we of the North hold the wealth of the country in our pockets.  They can’t fight against our money—­they can’t do it, sir.”

“Your ancestors fought against money, and fought passably well.”

“Yes, sir, for the great principles of human liberty.”

“Which these rebels believe they are fighting for.  You have need of all your money to keep a respectable army in the field.  These Southerners may have to fight in rags, as insurgents generally do:  witness the struggle of your Revolution; but until you lay waste their corn-fields and drive off their cattle, they will have full stomachs, and that, after all, is the first consideration.”

“You are an alien, sir, a foreigner; you know nothing of our great institutions; you know nothing of the wealth of the North, and the spirit of the people.”