s any woman's reputation is worth to be
staying with her. To think of that fellow being dancing and capering
at that Jezebel's house the night his baby was dying!"

"Oh, but, pa, he didn't know it."

"Know it? he ought to have known it! What business has a man to get
a woman with a lot of babies round her, and then go capering off?
'Twasn't the way I did, Polly, you know, when our babies were young. I
was always on the spot there, ready to take the baby, and walk up and
down with it nights, so that you might get your sleep; and I always
had it my side of the bed half the night. I'd like to have seen myself
out at a ball, and you sitting up with a sick baby! I tell you, that
if I caught any of my boys up to such tricks, I'd cut them out of my
will, and settle the money on their wives;--that's what I would!"

"Well, pa, I shall try and do all in my power for poor Mrs. Ferrola,"
said Mrs. Van Astrachan; "and you may be quite sure I won't take
another step towards Mrs. Follingsbee's acquaintance."

"It's a pity," said Mr. Van Astrachan, "that somebody couldn't put it
into Mr. John Seymour's head to send for his wife home.

"I don't see, for my part, what respectable women want to be
gallivanting and high-flying on their own separate account for, away
from their husbands! Goods that are sold shouldn't go back to the
shop-windows," said the good gentleman, all whose views of life were
of the most old-fashioned, domestic kind.

"Well, dear, we don't want to talk to Rose about any of this scandal,"
said his wife.

"No, no; it would be a pity to put any thing bad into a nice girl's
head," said Mr. Van Astrachan. "You might caution her in a general
way, you know; tell her, for instance, that I've heard of things that
make me feel you ought to draw off. Why can't some bird of the air
tell that little Seymour woman's husband to get her home?"

The little Seymour woman's husband, though not warned by any
particular bird of the air, was not backward in taking steps for the
recall of his wife, as shall hereafter appear.

CHAPTER XXV.

_WEDDING BELLS_.

Some weeks had passed in Springdale while these affairs had been going
on in New York. The time for the marriage of Grace had been set; and
she had gone to Boston to attend to that preparatory shopping which
even the most sensible of the sex discover to be indispensable on such
occasions.

Grace inclined, in the centre of her soul, to Bostonian rather than
New-Yo