lined with purple brush, golden-rod, black-bearded alder and sumach, flaming with scarlet berry cones and motley leaves.  It was her principle and habit to seize upon whatever morsels of delight were dropped in her way, and she had a taste for attractive bits of scenery, as for melody.  There was no reason why the evil estate of her companion should debar her from quiet enjoyment of the autumn day.  She was sorry that Mabel was suffering.  It was unpleasant to see pain or grief.  Smiles were prettier than glum looks.  She hoped she had enough humanity about her to enable her to recognize these facts.  But, in her soul, she despised the girl for her tacit acquiescence in her brother’s decree; contemned her yet more for her partial credence of the rumor of her lover’s unworthiness.  It was as well, taking these things into account, that Mabel was not communicative with regard to the great change that had befallen her since this hour yesterday, when she had exultingly proclaimed that her trust was “founded upon a rock.”

“Varium et mutabile semper faemina!” reflected Rosa, who knew that much Latin—­and attracted by the waving of the bright grasses beneath the waves of the rivulet they were crossing, she stopped to lean over the railing and poke them aside from the stones with a chincapin switch she had picked up a little way back.

Mabel did not look around; apparently did not observe that she walked on alone.

“I dare say she would not miss me for the next mile!” soliloquized the idle lounger, snatching foam-flakes from their nestling-places behind the rocks, and watching them as they danced down the stream.

Something, whiter and more regular in shape than they, lay upon the margin of the brook, partly concealed by a clump of sedge.  A letter, with the address uppermost!  Rosa’s optics were keen.  She easily made out the direction upon the envelope from where she stood.  It was Frederic Chilton’s name in Mrs. Sutton’s quaint, old-fashioned “back-hand” chirography.  An hour before, as Rosa now recollected, she had seen, from her window, a negro man take the path to the village, arranging some papers in the crown of his tattered straw hat.  He had dropped this, the most important of all, probably in stooping to drink from his hollowed palms at the spring-stream.  However this might be, there it lay—­the warning to the calumniated lover that his traducers were making clean (or foul) work with his fair fame in the quarter where he wished to stand at his best; perhaps citing him to appear and answer the damaging charges in person before the same tribunal.

“If she would only let me drop him a friendly line asking him, for her sake, to contradict this horrid slander!” the distraught matron had sighed, last night, in her recapitulation of the conversation with her obdurate niece.  “But she will not hear of it.”

“I hardly think he would like it either,” Rosa had rejoined.  “It would hint at distrust on your part or on hers.  Mr. Aylett’s letter should be sufficient to elicit the defence you crave.”