“Does mother want me?” asked Dorcas, turning round, with the box in her hand.

“No, no matter,” answered the mother; and, possibly with an intuitive feeling of what was in her daughter’s thought, she went into the bed-room, and looked with her at the pin and ring of Aunt Dorcas.

“Was it—­was it a long time, mother,—­I mean, before he came back?” said Dorcas.

“Who?  Captain Waterhouse?  Bless you! they was as good as merried for ten year, an’ he was goin’ all the time, an’ then, jest at the last minute, to be ’racked!  It’s ’most always so, when people goes to sea,” added she, in a plaintive tone.

Dorcas meditated; she looked wistfully at her mother.

“It’s a pretty pin,—­dreadful pretty round the edge.”

“Yes, ’t is!  I expect likely them’s di’mon’s.  ’T was made over in foreign parts.  He was goin’ to bring his picter, too, from there.  But he’s lost and gone!  Your Aunt Dorcas never had no more suitors after that, and she kind o’ gin in, and never had no sperits.”

Dorcas’s eyes filled, and she closed the box.

Henry Mowers would not come to the Fox farm till the next Sunday night.  That was as much settled as the new moon.  So Dorcas had the whole week to herself, to be thoroughly unhappy in,—­all the more so, a thousand times more so, for being utterly incapable of saying or seeing why.  An instinctive delicacy kept her from showing to any of the family that she was even depressed; and her voice was heard steadily warbling one of Wesley’s hymns, or “Wolfe’s Address to his Army,” in clear, brilliant tones, that rang up-stairs and down.  The general impression of distance and water associated her absent lover with all that was heroic and romantic in song; for of novels she knew nothing,—­the Colonel’s library being limited, in the imaginative line, to a torn copy of the “Iliad,” which had been left at the house by a travelling cobbler.

However, romance is before all rules, and shapes its own adventures.  The beauty of Swan Day, which, dark and slight as it was, gleamed with a power for Dorcas’s eye and heart before which Buonarotti’s would have been only pale stone forever,—­that beauty dwelt in her imagination and memory, as only first romantic impressions can.  Distance canonized him, enthroned him, glorified him.  And when she thought of his setting forth so boldly, so bravely, to tread the wide water, to tempt the hot sun, the foreign exposure, the perpetual dangers of heathen countries, for her unworthy sake, all that was tenderest, most grateful, in her now first wakened nature, rose up in distressful tumult, and agitated the depths that are in all women’s souls.

If there had been anybody to whom she could confide the sad wrenching of her spirit, any one who would have cleared her vision, and taught her to look on “this picture and on this,” she might not have been so puzzled between her two Hyperions.  But as it was, it was a sorrowful struggle.  One had the advantage of distance and imagination,—­one of presence, and of the magnetism of eye and lip.