“Is Mr. Harrington your guardian, Miss Bernard?” the lawyer asked, and ere Edith could reply, Arthur answered for her, “He is to be her husband.”

The lawyer bowed and went on with his writing, all unconscious of the wounds his question had tore open, leaving them to bleed afresh as both Arthur and Edith assumed a mask of studied indifference, never looking at or addressing each other again while that painful interview lasted.  It was over at length, and the lawyer gone.  Matters were adjusted as well they could be at present.  The negroes were to remain at Sunnybank under charge of an overseer as usual, while Arthur was to stay there, too, until he decided upon his future course.  This was his own proposition, and Edith acceded to it joyfully.  There were no sweet home associations, connected in her mind with Sunnybank, it is true, for she was too young when she left it to retain more than a dim, shadowy remembrance of a few scenes and places; but it had been Nina’s home; there she was born, there she had lived, there she had died, and Edith felt that it would not be one half so dreary looked back upon, if Arthur would stay there always.

“Why can’t you?” she asked of him when in the evening she sat with him in the rather gloomy parlor.  “I’ll make you my agent in general, giving you permission to do whatever you please, or would you rather live at Grassy Spring?”

“Anywhere but there,” was Arthur’s quick response, “I shall sell Grassy Spring and go abroad.  I shall be happier so.  I have never known the comfort of a home for any length of time, and it does not matter where I am.  My mother, as Grace may have told you, was a gay, fashionable woman, and after the period of mourning had expired, I only remember her resplendent in satin and diamonds, kissing me good-night ere her departure for some grand party.  Then, when I was eight years old, she, too, died, leaving me to the care of a guardian.  Thus, you see, I have no pleasant memories of a home, and the cafes of Paris will suit me as well as anything, perhaps.  Once I hoped for something better, but that is over now, Nina is dead, while you, on whom, as my wife’s sister, I have some claim, will soon be gone from here and I shall be alone.  I shall sell Grassy Spring,—­shall place the negroes there in your keeping, and then next spring leave the country, never to return, it may be.”

He ceased speaking, and there was a silence in the room which Edith could not break.  Arthur had told her frankly of his intended future, but she could not speak of hers—­could not tell him that Collingwood’s doors were ever open to him—­that she would be his sister in very deed—­that Richard would welcome him as a brother for her sake, and that the time might come when they could be happy thus.  All this passed through her mind, but not a word of it escaped her lips, lest by doing so she would betray her real feelings.  Arthur did not seem to her now as he had done a few days previous;