and almost every day she rode over to Woodlawn, admiring this, going into ecstasies over that, and patronizingly giving her advice on all subjects, while all the time her heart was swelling with bitter disappointment.  Having always felt so sure of securing Durward, she had invariably treated other gentlemen with such cool indifference that she was a favorite with but few, and as she considered these few her inferiors, she had more than once feared lest John Jr.’s prediction concerning the lettering on her tombstone should prove true!

“Anything but that,” said she, dashing away her tears, as she thought how ’Lena had supplanted her in the affections of the only person she could ever love,

“Old Marster Atherton done want to see you in the parlor,” said Corinda, putting her head in at the door.

Since his unfortunate affair with Anna, the captain had avoided Maple Grove, but feeling lonely at Sunnyside, he had come over this morning to call.  Finding Mrs. Livingstone absent, he had asked for Carrie, who was so unusually gracious that he wondered he had never before discovered how greatly superior to her sister she was!  All his favorite pieces were sung to him, and then, with the patience of a martyr, the young lady seated herself at the backgammon board, playing game after game, until she could scarcely tell her men from his.  On his way home the captain fell into a curious train of reflections, while Carrie, when asked by Corinda, if “old marster was done gone,” sharply reprimanded the girl, telling her “it was very impolite to call anybody old, particularly one so young as Captain Atherton!”

The next day the captain came again, and the next, and the next, until at last his former intimacy at Maple Grove seemed to be re-established.  And all this time no one had an inkling of the true state of things, not even John Jr., who never dreamed it possible for his haughty sister, to grace Sunnyside as its mistress.  “But stranger things than that had happened and were happening every day,” Carrie reasoned, as she sat alone in her room, revolving the propriety of answering “Yes” to a note which the captain had that morning placed in her hand at parting.  She looked at herself in the mirror.  Her face was very fair, and as yet untouched by a single mark or line.  She thought of him, bald, wrinkled, fat and forty-six!

“I’ll never do it,” she exclaimed.  “Better live single all my days.”

At this moment, the carriage of Mrs. Graham drew up, and from it alighted ’Lena, richly clad.  The sight of her produced a reaction, and Carrie thought again.  Captain Atherton was generous to a fault.  He was able and willing to grant her slightest wish, and as his wife, she could compete with, if not outdo, ’Lena in the splendor of her surroundings.  The pen was resumed, and Carrie wrote the words which sealed her destiny for life.  This done, nothing could move her, and though her father entreated, her mother scolded, and John Jr. swore, it made no difference.  “She was old enough to choose for herself,” she said, “and she had done so.”