"She is very unhappy!" replied Mabel, sighing. "And so, I doubt not,
is Winston, although he will not own it, and affects to ignore the
fact of her failing health and spirits. It is one of these miserably
delicate family complications with which the nearest of kin cannot
meddle. They are very kind to me, and I think my visits have been a
comfort to Clara. The solitude of the great house is a terrible
trial to one so fond of company. For days together sometimes she
does not exchange a word with anybody except the servants. It is a
dreary, wretched evening of an ambitious life. I ventured to tell
Winston, last week, that this wonld probably be my last visit to
Ridgeley, since I was to be married next month.
"To Mr. Chilton, I suppose?" he said.
I answered, "Yes!"
"You must be almost forty," he next remarked. "You have worn
passably well, but you are no longer young."
"I am thirty-seven!" said I.
"Well!" he answered. "Yon are certainly old enough to know your own
business best."
"That was all that passed. But I was glad to remember, as I looked
at his whitening hair and bowed shoulder, that Frederic had not--as
I was foolish enough to suppose for a while--told him the story that
had blighted his life. Not that I could have blamed him had he done
this. He had endured so much obloquy, suffered so keenly and so
long, that almost any retaliatory measure would have been
pardonable."
Herbert Dorrance's widow was, as had been said, on a farewell visit
to her native State, and after spending a week at Ridgeley was
concluding a pleasanter sojourn of the same length at William
Sutton's. In another month her home in Philadelphia was to be the
refuge of her aunt's declining years--a prospect that delighted her
as much as it afflicted those among whom this most benevolent and
lovable of match-makers had dwelt during Mabel's first marriage.
The marriage it was now her constant purpose to forget--not a
difficult task in the happiness that diffused an Indian summer glow
over her maturity of years and heart. After Herbert's death she had
continued to reside in Albany, devoting herself--so soon as she
recovered from the fatigue of mind and body consequent upon her
severe and protracted duties as nurse--to the scarcely less painful
work of attending his mother, who had contracted the seeds of
consumption in the bleak sea-air of Boston. Grateful for an abode in
the house of one who performed a daughter's part to her when her own
children were content to commit her to the care of hirelings, the
old lady lingered six months, and died, blessing her benefactress
and engaging, in singleness of belief in the affection his wife had
borne him, "to tell Herbert how good she had been to his mother."