ring, that the fathers
parted, not in anger, but in any thing but good feeling.

Sir Augustus Barry was not slow to set before his son the
disadvantages of a union where the extravagant habits of Miss Adams
had no more stable support than her father's life; he argued that a
want of forethought in the parents would be likely to produce a want
of forethought in the children; and knowing well what could be done
with such means as Dr. Adams had had at his command for years, he was
not inclined to put a kind construction upon so total a want of the
very quality which he considered the best a man could possess; after
some delay, and much consideration of the matter, he told his son that
he really could not consent to his marriage with a penniless bride.
And Dr. Adams, finding that the old gentleman, with a total want of
that delicacy which moneyed men do not frequently possess, had spoken
of what he termed too truly and too strongly his "heartless" want of
forethought, and characterised as a selfishness the indulgence of a
love for display and extravagance, when children were to be placed in
the world and portioned--insulted the son for the fault of the father,
and forbade his daughter to receive him.

Mary Adams endeavoured to bear this as meekly as she had borne the
flattery and the tenderness which had been lavished on her since her
birth. The bitter, bitter knowledge that she was considered by her
lover's family as a girl who, with the chance of being penniless,
lived like a princess, was inconceivably galling; and though she had
dismissed her lover, and knew that her father had insulted him, still
she wondered how he could so soon forget her, and never write even a
line of farewell. From her mother she did not expect sympathy; she
was too tender and too proud to seek it; and her father, more occupied
than ever, was seldom in his own house. Her uncle, who had not been in
town for some years, at last arrived, and was not less struck by the
extreme grace and beauty of his niece, than by the deep melancholy
which saddened her voice and weighed down her spirits. He was
evidently anxious to mention something which made him joyous and
happy; and when the doctor entered the library with him, he said, "And
may not Mary come in also?" Mary did come in; and her gentle presence
subdued her uncle's spirits. "I had meant to tell the intended change
in my family only to you, brother John; but it has occurred to me we
were all wrong a