t hesitate
an instant about becoming the wife of _un avocat;_ for,
agreeably to her habits, matrimony was a legitimate means of
bettering her condition in life. The plan was soon arranged. They
were to be married as soon as Annette's month's notice had expired,
and then they were to emigrate to the far west, where Mr. Bragg
proposed to practise law, or keep school, or to go to Congress, or to
turn trader, or to saw lumber, or, in short, to turn his hand to any
thing that offered; while Annette was to help along with the _menage_,
by making dresses, and teaching French; the latter occupation
promising to be somewhat peripatetic, the population being
scattered, and few of the dwellers in the interior deeming it
necessary to take more than a quarter's instruction in any of the
higher branches of education; the object being to _study_, as it
is called, and not to _know_. Aristabulus, who was filled with
_go-aheadism_, would have shortened the delay, but this Annette
positively resisted; her _esprit de corps_ as a servant, and all
her notions of justice, repudiating the notion that the connexion
which had existed so long between Eve and herself, was to be cut off
at a moment's warning. So diametrically were the ideas of the
_fiances_ opposed to each other, on this point, that at one time it
threatened a rupture, Mr. Bragg asserting the natural independence of
man to a degree that would have rendered him independent of all
obligations that were not effectually enacted by the law, and Annette
maintaining the dignity of a European _femme de chambre,_ whose
sense of propriety demanded that she should not quit her place
without giving a month's warning. The affair was happily decided by
Aristabulus's receiving a commission to tend a store, in the absence
of its owner; Mr. Effingham, on a hint from his daughter, having
profited by the annual expiration of the engagement, to bring their
connexion to an end.

This termination to the passion of Mr. Bragg would have afforded Eve
a good deal of amusement at any other moment; but a bride cannot be
expected to give too much of her attention to the felicity and
prospects of those who have no natural or acquired claims to her
affection. The cousins met, attired for the ceremony, in Mr.
Effingham's room, where he soon came in person, to lead them to the
drawing-room. It is seldom that two more lovely young women are
brought together on similar occasions. As Mr. Effingham stood between
th