"Dorrance!" repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she
rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the
leading incidents of her brother's wooing. "She lives near Boston,
you say, and her mother is a widow?"
"Yes. What have you ever heard about her?"
"Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name--but very foolishly!
I once knew a family of Dorrances--New Yorkers--but the father, a
retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were
married. The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older
than you judge the original of the miniature to be."
"She is not more than twenty-two, at the most," Mabel was sure.
Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her
curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not
"quiescent." The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.
"There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then?
or something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have
been relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a
common one to my ears."
"Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition. I
should be very sorry--"
He stopped.
Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness.
"Was not the family respectable?"
"Perfectly, my shrewd little catechist!" seeming to shake off an
uncomfortable incubus, as he laughed down at her serious face. "They
vaunted themselves upon the antiquity of their line, and were more
liberal in allusions to departed grandeur than was quite well-bred.
When I knew them they were not wealthy, or in what they would have
called 'society.' Indeed, the mother kept a private boarding-house
near the law-school I attended. There were several sons--very
decent, enterprising fellows. But one lived at home, and a daughter,
the wife of a lieutenant in the navy, whom I never saw. I boarded
with them for six months, or thereabout."
"You never saw the daughter! How was that?"
"I must have expressed myself awkwardly if I conveyed any such idea.
I did not meet the seafaring husband who was off upon a long cruise.
The wife I met constantly--knew very well. You need not look at me
so intently, love, as if you feared that some dark mystery lurked
behind this matter-of-fact recital. If I do not tell you every event
of my former life, it is not because it was vile. I could not
sustain the light of your innocent eyes if I had ever been guilty of
aught dishonorable or criminal. But even the follies and mistakes of
a young man's early career are not fit themes for your ears. And I
was no wiser, no more wary, than other youths of the same age; was
apt to believe that fair which was only specious, and that I might
play, uninjured, with edged tools. Nor had I seen you then, my
treasure--my snow-drop of purity! Mabel! do you know how solemn a
thing it is to be loved and trusted by a man, as I love and confide
in you? It terrifies me when I think of the absoluteness of my
dependence upon your fidelity--of how rich I am in having you--how
poor, wretched, and miserable I should be without you. I shall not
draw a free breath until you are mine beyond the chance of recall."