Mabel shrank back before the horror of the absurd imagination.

Winston raised the picture to his lips.

“My peerless one!”

CHAPTER III

Unwholesome vapors.

“Dorrance!” repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the leading incidents of her brother’s wooing.  “She lives near Boston, you say, and her mother is a widow?”

“Yes.  What have you ever heard about her?”

“Nothing whatever.  I was startled by the name—­but very foolishly!  I once knew a family of Dorrances—­New Yorkers—­but the father, a retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were married.  The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older than you judge the original of the miniature to be.”

“She is not more than twenty-two, at the most,” Mabel was sure.

Frederic’s hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston’s curb, it was not “quiescent.”  The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.

“There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then? or something objectionable in the people themselves?  Could they have been relatives of this widow and her daughter?  The name is not a common one to my ears.”

“Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition.  I should be very sorry—­”

He stopped.

Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness.

“Was not the family respectable?”

“Perfectly, my shrewd little catechist!” seeming to shake off an uncomfortable incubus, as he laughed down at her serious face.  “They vaunted themselves upon the antiquity of their line, and were more liberal in allusions to departed grandeur than was quite well-bred.  When I knew them they were not wealthy, or in what they would have called ‘society.’  Indeed, the mother kept a private boarding-house near the law-school I attended.  There were several sons—­very decent, enterprising fellows.  But one lived at home, and a daughter, the wife of a lieutenant in the navy, whom I never saw.  I boarded with them for six months, or thereabout.”

“You never saw the daughter!  How was that?”

“I must have expressed myself awkwardly if I conveyed any such idea.  I did not meet the seafaring husband who was off upon a long cruise.  The wife I met constantly—­knew very well.  You need not look at me so intently, love, as if you feared that some dark mystery lurked behind this matter-of-fact recital.  If I do not tell you every event of my former life, it is not because it was vile.  I could not sustain the light of your innocent eyes if I had ever been guilty of aught dishonorable or criminal.  But even the follies and mistakes of a young man’s early career are not fit themes for your ears.  And I was no wiser, no more wary,