“Are you very sure?” asked the young man, rising and throwing away his cigar-end.

“Upon my word,” cried Cecilia, “one would suppose I wished to keep you for myself.  Of course I am sure!  But as the penalty of your insinuations, I shall invite the plainest and prosiest damsel that can be found, and leave you alone with her.”

Rowland smiled.  “Even against her,” he said, “I should be sorry to conclude until I had given her my respectful attention.”

This little profession of ideal chivalry (which closed the conversation) was not quite so fanciful on Mallet’s lips as it would have been on those of many another man; as a rapid glance at his antecedents may help to make the reader perceive.  His life had been a singular mixture of the rough and the smooth.  He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.  His progenitors had submitted in the matter of dogmatic theology to the relaxing influences of recent years; but if Rowland’s youthful consciousness was not chilled by the menace of long punishment for brief transgression, he had at least been made to feel that there ran through all things a strain of right and of wrong, as different, after all, in their complexions, as the texture, to the spiritual sense, of Sundays and week-days.  His father was a chip of the primal Puritan block, a man with an icy smile and a stony frown.  He had always bestowed on his son, on principle, more frowns than smiles, and if the lad had not been turned to stone himself, it was because nature had blessed him, inwardly, with a well of vivifying waters.  Mrs. Mallet had been a Miss Rowland, the daughter of a retired sea-captain, once famous on the ships that sailed from Salem and Newburyport.  He had brought to port many a cargo which crowned the edifice of fortunes already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so sea-worthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing.  He was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco and eying the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial minds interpreted as a sign of repentance.  At last, one evening, he disappeared beneath it, as he had often done before; this time, however, not as a commissioned navigator, but simply as an amateur of an observing turn likely to prove oppressive to the officer in command of the vessel.  Five months later his place at home knew him again, and made the acquaintance also of a handsome, blonde young woman, of redundant contours, speaking a foreign tongue.  The foreign tongue proved, after much conflicting research, to be the idiom of Amsterdam, and the young woman, which was stranger still, to be Captain Rowland’s wife.  Why he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had happened between them before, and whether—­though it was of questionable