“What time is it, and where are you going, dear?” she asked, dozily wondering if the carriage for the wedding-tour was at the door so soon.

“It’s only nine, and I am going for a sail, Aunt Pen.”

As Debby spoke, the light flashed full into her face, and a sudden thought into Mrs. Carroll’s mind.  She rose up from her pillow, looking as stately in her nightcap as Maria Theresa is said to have done in like unassuming head-gear.

“Something has happened, Dora!  What have you done?  What have you said?  I insist upon knowing immediately,” she demanded, with somewhat startling brevity.

“I have said ‘No’ to Mr. Leavenworth and ‘Yes’ to Mr. Evan; and I should like to go home to-morrow, if you please,” was the equally concise reply.

Mrs. Carroll fell flat in her bed, and lay there stiff and rigid as Morlena Kenwigs.  Debby gently drew the curtains, and stole away, leaving Aunt Pen’s wrath to effervesce before morning.

The moon was hanging luminous and large on the horizon’s edge, sending shafts of light before her till the melancholy ocean seemed to smile, and along that shining pathway happy Debby and her lover floated into that new world where all things seem divine.

* * * * *

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

III.

Will any of our artists ever give us, on canvas, a good, rattling, saucy shower?  There is room in it for a rare handling of the brush:—­the vague, indistinguishable line of hills, (as I see them to-day,)—­the wild scud of gray, with fine gray lines, slanted by the wind, and trending eagerly downward,—­the swift, petulant dash into the little pools of the highway, making fairy bubbles that break as soon as they form,—­the land smoking with excess of moisture,—­and the pelted leaves all wincing and shining and adrip.

I know no painter who has so well succeeded in putting a wet sky into his pictures as Turner; and in this I judge him by the literal chiaroscuro of engraving.  In proof of it, I take down from my shelf his “Rivers of France”:  a book over which I have spent a great many pleasant hours, and idle ones too,—­if it be idle to travel leagues at the turning of a page, and to see hill-sides spotty with vineyards, and great bridges wallowing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of Honfleur putting to sea.  There are skies, as I said, in some of these pictures which make a man instinctively think of his umbrella, or of his distance from home:  no actual rain-drift stretching from them, but such unmistakable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little parallel wisps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a provident farmer order every scythe out of the field.