She saw a shadow approaching to join itself to hers upon the whitened floor without, before Mr. Dorrance interrupted her reverie by words.

“The fury of the tempest you admire proves its paternity,” he said, with a manifest effort at lightness.  “It emanates from the vast magazines of frost, snow, and wintry wind that lie far to the north-east even of my home, and that is in a region you would think drear and inhospitable after the more clement airs of of your native State.”

“We have very cold weather in Virginia sometimes,” returned Mabel, still scanning the sentinel gate-posts, and the pyramidal arbor-vitae trees flanking them.

Her gaze was a mournful farewell, but she neglected none of the amenities of hospitality.  She was used to talking commonplaces.

“We feel it all the more, too, on account of the mildness of the greater part of the winter,” she subjoined.

“Allow me!” said the other, looping back the curtain she had until now held in her hand.  “Whereas our systems are braced by a more uniform temperature to endure the severity of our frosts, and high, keen blasts.”

“I suppose so,” assented Mabel, mechanically, and unconscious as himself that meaning glances were stolen at them from the fireside circle, while the hum and conversation was continuous and louder, for the good-natured intent on the speakers’ part to afford the supposed lovers the chance of carrying on their dialogue unheard.

“But our houses are very comfortable—­often very beautiful,” Mr. Dorrance persevered, keeping to the scent of his game, as a trained pointer scours a stubble-field, narrowing his beat at every circuit; “and the hearts of those who live in them are warm and constant.  It is not always true that

    “’The cold in clime are cold in blood;
     Their love can scarce deserve the name.

“I have thought sometimes that that feeling is strongest and most enduring, the demonstration of which is guarded and infrequent, as the deepest portion of the channel is the most quiet.”

If his philosophical and scientific talk were heavy and solid, his poetry and metaphors were ponderous and labored.  Yet Mabel listened to him now, neither facing nor avoiding him, looking down at her hands, laid, one above the other, upon the window-sill, the image of maidenly and courteous attention.

Why should she affect diffidence, or seek to escape what she had foreseen for weeks, and made no effort to ward off?  She had come to the conclusion in October that Herbert Dorrance would, when the forms he considered indispensable to regular courtship had been gone through with, ask her to marry him, and coolly taken her resolution to accept him.  This morning, on the reception of a handsome Christmas gift from him, and discovering in his actions something more pointed than his customary punctilious devoirs, and in his didacticism the outermost of the closing circle of pursuit she had furthermore concluded that his happy thought was to celebrate the festal season by his betrothment.  She was quite ready for the declaration, which, she anticipated, would be pompous and formal.  She would have excused him from “doing” the poetical part of it; but, since it was on the programme, it was not her province to interfere.