He laughed naturally and pleasantly.  Having confessed to what he regarded as a ridiculous succumbing of his buoyant spirit to atmospheric influences, he shook off the nightmare as if it had never sat upon him.

Mabel was grave still.

“There is something weirdly oppressive in the night,” she said, in a low, awed tone.  “But the burden you describe has weighed me down since morning.  While Rosa was singing, I felt suddenly removed from you by a horrid gulf.  What if all this should be the preparation to us for some impending danger?”

“Sweet! these are unwholesome vapors of the imagination.  Nothing can be a disaster that leaves us to one another,” was the text of Frederic’s fond soothing; and by the time Mrs. Sutton descended from her chamber of meditation, to remind Imogene that the seeds of ague and fever lurked in the river-fogs, the couple from the piazza came into the lighted parlor, all smiles and animation, wondering, jocosely, what had become of the recent occupants of the apartment.

Neither reappeared until breakfast-time next morning.  Rosa was like freshly-poured champagne, in sweet and sparkle.  Alfred, rueful and limp, as if the dripping clouds that verified Mabel’s prediction had soaked him all night.  He was dry and comfortable—­to carry out the figure—­within twenty minutes after his beloved fluttered, like a tame canary, into the chair next his own—­in five more, was more truly her slave, living in, and upon her smiles—­adoring her very caprices as he had never admired another woman’s virtues—­than he had been prior to the brief, but tempestuous scene over night.  She was the life of the party assembled in the dining-room.  Imogene had caught cold, walking bareheaded in the evening air, and Tom condoled with her upon her influenza and sore-throat too sincerely to do justice to the rest of his friends and his breakfast.  Mr. Aylett was never talkative, and his unvarying, soulless politeness to all produced the conserving effect upon chill and low spirits that the atmosphere of a refrigerator does upon whatever is placed within it.  Mrs. Sutton’s motherly heart was yearning pityingly over the lovers who were soon to be sundered, while Mabel’s essay at cheerful equanimity imposed upon nobody’s credulity.  Frederic comported himself like a man—­the more courageously because the host’s cold eye was upon him, and he surmised that sighs and sentimentality would meet very scant indulgence in that quarter.  Moreover, he was not so unreasonable as to descry insupportable hardships in this parting.  By agreement with Mr. Aylett and his sister, he was, if all went prosperously, to revisit Ridgeley at the end of six weeks, when his design was to entreat his betrothed to name the wedding day.  The prospect might well support him under the present trial.  He bore Rosa’s badinage gallantly, tossing back sprightly and telling rejoinders that called forth the smiling applause of the auditors, and commanded her respectful recognition of him as a foeman worthy of her steel.