with dismay that Susan had been irritable and snappish just before parting yester eve—­a trait she had never exhibited to him before.  When he arrived, his heart almost failed him, but after some little circumlocution and excuse he revealed the favor, the great favor, he was come to ask.  He asked it.  She granted it without the shade of a demur.  He was no less surprised than delighted, but the truth is that very irritation and snappishness of yesterday was the cause of her consenting; her conscience told her she had been unkind, and he had been too wise to snap in return.  So now he benefited by the reaction and little bit of self-reproach.  For do but abstain from reproaching a good girl who has been unjust or unkind to you, and ten to one if she does not make you the amemde by word or deed—­most likely the latter, for so she can soothe her tender conscience without grazing her equally sensitive pride.  Poor Susan little knew the importance of the concession she made so easily.

Meadows galloped home triumphant.  But two whole days now between him and his bliss!  And that day passed and Tuesday passed.  The man lived three days and nights in a state of tension that would have killed some of us or driven us mad; but his intrepid spirit rode the billows of hope and fear like a petrel.  And the day before the wedding it did seem as if his adverse fate got suddenly alarmed and made a desperate effort and hurled against him every assailant that could be found.  In the morning came his mother, and implored him ere it was too late to give up this marriage.  “I have kept silence, yea even from good words,” said the aged woman; “but at last I must speak.  John, she does not love you.  I am a woman and can read a woman’s heart; and you fancied her long before George Fielding was false to her, if false he ever was, John.”

The old woman said the whole of this last sentence with so much meaning that her son was stung to rage, and interrupted her fiercely:  “I looked to find all the world against me, but not my own mother.  No matter, so be it; the whole world shan’t turn me, and those I don’t care to fight I’ll fly.”

And he turned savagely on his heel and left the old woman there shocked and terrified by his vehemence.  She did not stay there long.  Soon the scarlet cloak and black bonnet might have been seen wending their way slowly back to the little cottage, the poor old tidy bonnet drooping lower than it was wont.  Meadows came back to dinner; he had a mutton-chop in his study, for it was a busy day.  While thus employed there came almost bursting into the room a man struck with remorse—­Jefferies, the recreant postmaster.

“Mr. Meadows, I can carry on this game no longer, and I won’t for any man living!” He then in a wild, loud, and excited way went on to say how the poor girl had come a hundred times for a letter, and looked in his face so wistfully, and once she had said:  “Oh, Mr. Jefferies, do have a letter for me!” and how he saw her pale face in his dreams, and little he thought when he became Meadows’ tool the length the game was to be carried.