orried while she was speaking, but
forced a pleasant professional smile, as he said cheerily, and as if
wishing to change the subject,

"Have a good dance this evening, Elsie. The fiddlers are tuning up.
Where 's the young master? has he come yet? or is he going to be late,
with the other great folks?"

The girl turned away without answering, and looked toward the door.

The "great folks," meaning the mansion-house gentry, were just beginning
to come; Dudley Venner and his daughter had been the first of them.
Judge Thornton, white-headed, fresh-faced, as good at sixty as he was at
forty, with a youngish second wife, and one noble daughter, Arabella,
who, they said, knew as much law as her father, a stately, Portia like
girl, fit for a premier's wife, not like to find her match even in the
great cities she sometimes visited; the Trecothicks, the family of a
merchant, (in the larger sense,) who, having made himself rich enough by
the time he had reached middle life, threw down his ledger as Sylla did
his dagger, and retired to make a little paradise around him in one of
the stateliest residences of the town, a family inheritance; the
Vaughans, an old Rockland race, descended from its first settlers,
Toryish in tendency in Revolutionary times, and barely escaping
confiscation or worse; the Dunhams, a new family, dating its gentility
only as far back as the Honorable Washington Dunham, M. C., but turning
out a clever boy or two that went to college; and some showy girls with
white necks and fat arms who had picked up professional husbands: these
were the principal mansion-house people. All of them had made it a point
to come; and as each of them entered, it seemed to Colonel and Mrs.
Sprowle that the lamps burned up with a more cheerful light, and that the
fiddles which sounded from the uncarpeted room were all half a tone
higher and half a beat quicker.

Mr. Bernard came in later than any of them; he had been busy with his new
duties. He looked well and that is saying a good deal; for nothing but a
gentleman is endurable in full dress. Hair that masses well, a head set
on with an air, a neckerchief tied cleverly by an easy, practised hand,
close-fitting gloves, feet well shaped and well covered,--these
advantages can make us forgive the odious sable broadcloth suit, which
appears to have been adopted by society on the same principle that
condemned all the Venetian gondolas to perpetual and uniform blackness.
Mr. Be