or spoke to one another, even at table, unless there were visitors present.  Nobody could imagine what caused the estrangement, and for the sake of the family honor I guarded my tongue.  She must be a wretched woman, if all of this be true.  She is breaking fast under it, in spite of her pride and skill in concealment.  I ought not to pity her when I remember how wicked she has been; but there is a look in her eye when she is not laughing or talking that gives me the heart-ache.”

“She is very unhappy!” replied Mabel, sighing.  “And so, I doubt not, is Winston, although he will not own it, and affects to ignore the fact of her failing health and spirits.  It is one of these miserably delicate family complications with which the nearest of kin cannot meddle.  They are very kind to me, and I think my visits have been a comfort to Clara.  The solitude of the great house is a terrible trial to one so fond of company.  For days together sometimes she does not exchange a word with anybody except the servants.  It is a dreary, wretched evening of an ambitious life.  I ventured to tell Winston, last week, that this wonld probably be my last visit to Ridgeley, since I was to be married next month.

“To Mr. Chilton, I suppose?” he said.

I answered, “Yes!”

“You must be almost forty,” he next remarked.  “You have worn passably well, but you are no longer young.”

“I am thirty-seven!” said I.

“Well!” he answered.  “Yon are certainly old enough to know your own business best.”

“That was all that passed.  But I was glad to remember, as I looked at his whitening hair and bowed shoulder, that Frederic had not—­as I was foolish enough to suppose for a while—­told him the story that had blighted his life.  Not that I could have blamed him had he done this.  He had endured so much obloquy, suffered so keenly and so long, that almost any retaliatory measure would have been pardonable.”

Herbert Dorrance’s widow was, as had been said, on a farewell visit to her native State, and after spending a week at Ridgeley was concluding a pleasanter sojourn of the same length at William Sutton’s.  In another month her home in Philadelphia was to be the refuge of her aunt’s declining years—­a prospect that delighted her as much as it afflicted those among whom this most benevolent and lovable of match-makers had dwelt during Mabel’s first marriage.

The marriage it was now her constant purpose to forget—­not a difficult task in the happiness that diffused an Indian summer glow over her maturity of years and heart.  After Herbert’s death she had continued to reside in Albany, devoting herself—­so soon as she recovered from the fatigue of mind and body consequent upon her severe and protracted duties as nurse—­to the scarcely less painful work of attending his mother, who had contracted the seeds of consumption in the bleak sea-air of Boston.  Grateful for an abode in the house of one who performed a daughter’s part to her when her own children were content to commit her to the care of hirelings, the old lady lingered six months, and died, blessing her benefactress and engaging, in singleness of belief in the affection his wife had borne him, “to tell Herbert how good she had been to his mother.”