“How am I to punish you for your naughty distrust of my friendship and common sense?  I have been too busy all day to spare a minute for social pleasure.  I dined at two o’clock, having an appointment at three, returned at half-past five, and was just coming down to your parlor to look you up.  Another bit of unimportant news, with which I should not have annoyed you if you had not merited a little vexation by your preposterous fancies, is, that, instead of taking an early train to Philadelphia, I have to-day entered into engagements that will oblige me to prolong my stay in this place until the first of February.”

He looked bright and cheerful, ready for sport or badinage.  Rosa caught herself wondering many times during that evening, and the succeeding days of the three weeks they passed under the same roof, if she had dreamed of—­not beheld with her bodily optics—­that one stormy burst of passion which had been his farewell to the hope of a final reconciliation with Mabel Aylett.

He never spoke of her again, or referred, in the most distant manner, to his visit at Ridgeley.  The omission was an agreeable one to Rosa for several reasons.  Silence, she believed, was to oblivion as a means to an end.  Judging from herself, she adopted the theory that people were apt to forget what they never talked of themselves, nor heard mentioned by others.  Furthermore, she was relieved from the necessity of concocting diplomatic evasions, dexterously skirting the truth, to say nothing of plump falsehoods.  These last cost her conscience some unpleasant twinges.  To avoid narrating in full what had happened was a work of art.  A downright lie was a stroke of heavy business, unsuited to her airy genius—­and when the Aylett-Chilton complication was upon the tapis, it was difficult to avoid undertaking such.

For three weeks, then, Mr. Frederic Chilton and the Virginian belle visited concert, theatre, and assembly-room in company, sat side by side in the spectators’ gallery of House and Senate chamber, walked in daylight along the broad avenues from one magnificent distance to another, and on home-evenings—­which were not many—­chatted together familiarly, the well-pleased Masons thought confidentially, by the fireside in the family parlor.  It must not be inferred from their constant intercourse that he had the field entirely to himself.  Gallants of divers pretensions—­first-class, mediocre, and contemptible—­considered with a practical eye to “settlement,” hovered about the fascinating witch as moths about a gas-burner, and had no citable cause of complaint of non-appreciation, inasmuch as she shed equal light upon all, save one.  “My very old friend, Mr. Chilton,” she was wont to denominate him in conversation with those who inwardly called themselves fools for their jealousy of a man of whom she spoke thus frankly, with never a stammer or blush; yet they acknowledged to themselves all the while that they were both suspicious and envious