“You are in the right, perhaps!” But Mrs. Sutton had looked miserably discontented.  “Yet to be frank with you, Rosa, Winston is not apt to be conciliatory in his measures when he takes it into his head that the family honor is assailed.  I am afraid he has written haughtily, if not insolently, to poor Frederic.”

Rosa had no doubt of this, even while she answered, “Neither haughtiness nor downright insolence would prevent a man who has so much at stake as has Mr. Chilton, from taking instant steps to re-establish himself in the respect of the family he desires to enter.  This is a very delicate matter—­take what view of it we may.  Hadn’t you better wait a few days before you interfere?  Nothing can be lost—­something may be gained by prudent delay.”

“And I suppose Winston would be very much displeased at my officiousness, as he would term it,” had been Mrs. sutton’s reluctant concession to her young guest’s discreet counsels.  “But it is very hard to remain quiet, and see everything going to destruction about one!”

She had evidently reconsidered her resolution to let things take their wrong-headed course, and in virtue of her prerogatives as match-maker and mender, had thrust her oar into the very muddy whirlpool boiling about the bark of her darling’s happiness.

Rosa wrought out this chain of sequences, with many other links, stretching far past present exigences and possibilities, ere Mabel’s figure disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill rising beyond the brook.  Should Frederic Chilton receive that letter, in less than a week—­in three days, perhaps, for he was a man prompt to resolve and to do—­he would present himself at Ridgeley to speak in his own behalf—­an event Rosa considered eminently undesirable.  Certainly Mabel’s pusillanimity merited no such reward.  She had no right to question the rectitude that one she professed to love, nor her aunt the right to act as mediator.  If Mabel Aylett, with her found sense and judgment, and her inherent strength of will, would not hold fast to her faith in her affianced husband, and defy her brother to sunder them, let her lose that which she prized so lightly.

If the epistle, soaking slowly there in the wet, had been committed to Rosa’s charge, she would have scorned to intercept it; would have deposited it safely and punctually in the post-office.  As it was, if she left it alone, Frederic would never get it, and Mrs. Sutton remain unconscious of its fate—­unless some other passer-by should perceive and rescue it from illegibility and dissolution; unless Mabel should espy it on their return-walk, or, coming back, the next moment, to seek her truant mate, catch sight of the snowy leaflet of peace in its snuggery under the sedge.

A startled partridge flew over Rosa’s head from the thither rising ground, and in the belief that he was the harbinger of the approach she dreaded, she dislodged the envelope from its covert, with a quick touch of her little wand, and it floated down the stream.