“But where are they now?” asked St. Leon.

Uncle Israel looked at him for a moment, and then replied, “The Lord knows, I suppose, but Israel don’t.”

“Did they suffer at all?” asked St. Leon.

“Not as long as I stuck to them, but they sarved me real mean,” answered Uncle Israel.

“In what way?”

“Why, you see,” said Uncle Israel, “I don’t know why, but somehow I never thought of matrimony till I got a glimpse of Ada at her father’s vandue.  To be sure, I’d seen her before, but then she was mighty big feelin’, and I couldn’t ha’ touched her with a hoe-handle, but now ’twas different.  I bought their house.  I was rich and they was poor.”

Involuntarily St. Leon clinched his fist, as Uncle Israel continued:  “I seen to getting them a place in the country and then tended to ’em generally for more than six months, when I one day hinted to Mrs. Linwood that I would like to be her son-in-law.  Christopher! how quick her back was up, and she gave me to understand that I was lookin’ too high!  ’Twas no go with Ada, and after awhile I proposed to the mother.  Then you ought to seen her!  She didn’t exactly turn me out o’ door but she coolly told me I wasn’t wanted there.  But I stuck to her and kept kind o’ offerin’ myself, till at last they cut stick and cleared out, and I couldn’t find them, high nor low.  I bunted for more than a year, and at last found them in Hartford.  Thinkin’ maybe they had come to I proposed again, and kept hangin’ on till they gave me the slip again; and now I don’t know where they be, but I guess they’ve changed their name.”

At this point the cars stopped until the upward train should pass them, and St. Leon, rising, bade his companion good evening, saying, “he had changed his mind and should return to Hartford on the other train.”

CHAPTER VI.

EXPLANATION.

Six years prior to the commencement of our story New Haven boasted not a better or wealthier citizen than Harcourt Linwood, of whose subsequent failure and death we have heard from Uncle Israel.  The great beauty of his only child, Ada, then a girl of nearly thirteen, was the subject of frequent comment among the circle in which he moved.  No pains were spared with her education, and many were the conjectures as to what she would be when time had matured her mind and beauty.

Hugh St. Leon, of New Orleans, then nineteen years of age, and a student at Yale, had frequently met Ada at the house of his sister, Mrs. Durant, whose eldest daughter, Jenny, was about her own age.  The uncommon beauty of the child greatly interested the young Southerner and once, in speaking of his future prospects to his sister, he playfully remarked, “Suppose I wait for Ada Linwood.”

“You cannot do better,” was the reply, and the conversation terminated.

The next evening there was to be a child’s party at the house of Mrs. Durant, and as Hugh was leaving the house Jenny bounded after him, saying, “Oh, Uncle Hugh, you’ll come to-morrow night, won’t you?  No matter if you are a grown-up man, in the junior class, trying to raise some whiskers!  You will be a sort of restraint, and keep us from getting too rude.  Besides, we are going to have tableaux, and I want you to act the part of bridegroom in one of the scenes.”