without a glimpse of the train her
thoughtless words fired--"perhaps he means for you to marry Frarnie!"
laughing a little laugh at the absurd impossibility.

And Andrew started as if a bee had stung him, and saw it all. But in a
moment he only drew Louie closer, and kissed her more passionately, and
sat there caressing her the more tenderly while they listened to a thrush
that had built in the garden thicket, mistaking it for the wood, so near
the town's edge was it, and so still and sunny was the garden all day long
with its odors of southernwood and mint and balm; and he delayed there
longer, holding her as if now at least she was his own, whatever she might
be thereafter.

As he walked home that night, and went and sat upon the wharf and watched
the starlit tide come in, he saw it all again, but with thoughts like a
procession of phantoms, as if they had no part even in the possible things
of life, and were indeed nothing to him. How could they have any meaning
to him--to him, Louie's lover? What would the whole world be to him, what
the sailing of the Sabrina, without Louie? And then a shiver ran across
him: what would Louie be to him without the sailing of the Sabrina! for
that, indeed, as he had said, was the top of his ambition, and that being
his ambition, perhaps ambition, was as strong with him as love.

But with this new discovery on Andrew's part of Mr. Maurice's desires,
Andrew could only recall circumstances, words, looks, hints: he could not
shape to himself any line of duty or its consequences: enough to see that
Mr. Maurice fancied his simple and thoughtless attentions to Frarnie to be
lover-like, and, approving him, looked kindly on them and made his plans
accordingly; enough to see that if he should reject this tacit proffer of
the daughter's hand, then the Sabrina was scarcely likely to be his; and
that in spite of such probability, the first and requisite thing in honor
for him to do was to tell Mr. Maurice of his marriage engagement with
Louie, and then, if the man had neither gratitude nor sense enough to
reward him for his assistance in saving the brig, to trust to fortune and
to time, that at last makes all things even. As he sat there listening to
the lapping of the water and idly watching the reflected stars peer up and
shatter in a hundred splinters with every wash of the dark tide, he could
not so instantaneously decide as to whether he should make this confession
or not. "What business is