Exclamations, questionings, elicited little from Marian.  The strain of the long, eventful day had been too great, and the young girl, who might have been taken as a type of incensed womanhood a few moments before, now had scarcely better resources than such remedies as Mrs. Vosburgh’s matronly experience knew how to apply.  Few remain long on mountain-tops, physical or metaphorical, and deep valleys lie all around them.  Little else could be done for the poor girl than to bring the oblivion of sleep, and let kindly Nature nurse her child back to a more healthful condition of body and mind.

But it would be long before Willard Merwyn would be amenable to the gentle offices of nature.  Simpson, the footman, flirting desperately with the pretty waitress in the kitchen below, heard his master’s swift, heavy step on the veranda, and hastened out only in time to clamber into his seat as Merwyn drove furiously away in the rain and darkness.  Every moment the trembling lackey expected they would all go to-wreck and ruin, but the sagacious animals were given their heads, and speedily made their way home.

The man took the reeking steeds to the stable, and Merwyn disappeared.  He did not enter the house, for he felt that he would stifle there, and the thought of meeting his mother was intolerable.  Therefore, he stole away to a secluded avenue, and strode back and forth under the dripping trees, oblivious, in his fierce perturbation, of outward discomfort.

Mrs. Merwyn waited in vain for him to enter, then questioned the attendant.

“Faix, mum, I know nothin’ at all.  Mr. Willard druv home loike one possessed, and got out at the door, and that’s the last oi’ve seen uv ’im.”

The lady received the significant tidings with mingled anxiety and satisfaction.  Two things were evident.  He had become more interested in Miss Vosburgh than he had admitted, and she, by strange good fortune, had refused him.

“It was a piece of folly that had to come in some form, I suppose,” she soliloquized, “although I did not think Willard anything like so sure to perpetrate it as most young men.  Well, the girl has saved me not a little trouble, for, of course, I should have been compelled to break the thing up;” and she sat down to watch and wait.  She waited so long that anxiety decidedly got the better of her satisfaction.

Meanwhile the object of her thoughts was passing through an experience of which he had never dreamed.  In one brief hour his complacency, pride, and philosophy of life had been torn to tatters.  He saw himself as Marian saw him, and he groaned aloud in his loathing and humiliation.  He looked back upon his superior airs as ridiculous, and now felt that he would rather be a private in Strahan’s company than the scorned and rejected wretch that he was.  The passionate nature inherited from his mother was stirred to its depths.  Even the traits which he believed to be derived from his father, and which the calculating