“The low-bred hound!” he muttered.  “This is his doing!”

Mabel halted at the stair-head, the blood suddenly and utterly forsaking her cheeks when he spoke her name, although his address was purposely kind, and, he thought, inviting.

“Can you spare me a moment?” he continued, smilingly, to win her advance.  “I will not detain you long.  I know you are agonizing to have your talk out, Miss Rosa.”

Rosa laughed, with a saucy retort, and turned into her chamber.

Mabel entered her brother’s, and without speaking, took the seat he offered.  She was to be sentenced, and she must reserve her forces to sustain the pain without a groan.

“You saw Jenkyns—­did you not?” began Mr. Aylett, with the manner of one at peace with himself, and those of his fellow-men whose existence he chose to acknowledge.

“I did.  He made memoranda of your orders, and said all should be done as you wished.”

“I ordered the masons, this evening, to begin the hall-chimney to-morrow.  While the work is going on, you had better occupy some other bed-room.  I shall hurry it forward, day and night, or it will not be done in season for us when we return from our bridal-tour.  The carpets must be down, and the paper dry by the fifteenth at farthest.  Clara bought your dresses, and offers to have them made, if you will send her an accurate measurement.  You are about her height, although not so well-proportioned.  Your figure is angular, where hers is round.  She is your senior by several years, yet one might easily mistake her for a girl of twenty, her complexion is so fresh.  Her twenty-five years show themselves in nothing except her ease of manner, maturity of thought, and elegance of diction.”

He would have sneered at this strain in another as hyperbolical and fatuous.  The absurdity of it in his mouth consisted mainly in the cool arrogance of the assumption that whatever belonged to him was above adverse criticism, and would be maligned if it were referred to without appending an encomium.  Much of fervor might and did mingle in his thoughts of her he was to wed, but none warmed his enumeration of her perfections.  He did nothing con amore, unless it were exalting the dignity and glory of the Aylett name, and maintaining his right to support their ancient honors.

Mabel did not respond to his gratuitous praise of the fair and benevolent Clara.  While he was talking, he seemed to recede a great way from her; his tones to ring hollowly upon her hearing, his form to grow indistinct.  Was he playing with her suspense, or could it be that he—­a being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on which she waa stretched—­no suspicion that every one of his deliberate sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture?  The Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of suffering save intense pallor; made this less palpable by screening her eyes from the lamp-light with a paper she took from the table, and thereby throwing her features into deep shadow.