ng; "we will go with you in a
moment."

And soon Colonel Burr, with one on either arm, was to be seen on the top
of the hill beyond the house,--the very one from which Mary, the week
before, had seen the retreating sail we all wot of. Hence, though
her companion contrived, with the adroitness of a practised man of
gallantry, to direct his words and looks as constantly to her as if
they had been in a _tete-a-tete_, and although nothing could be more
graceful, more delicately flattering, more engaging, still the little
heart kept equal poise; for where a true love has once bolted the door,
a false one serenades in vain under the window.

Some fine, instinctive perceptions of the real character of the man
beside her seemed to have dawned on Mary's mind in the conversation of
the morning;--she had felt the covert and subtile irony that lurked
beneath his polished smile, felt the utter want of faith or sympathy in
what she and her revered friend deemed holiest, and therefore there was
a calm dignity in her manner of receiving his attentions which rather
piqued and stimulated his curiosity. He had been wont to boast that he
could subdue any woman, if he could only see enough of her; in the first
interview in the garden, he had made her color come and go and brought
tears to her eyes in a manner that interested his fancy, and he could
not resist the impulse to experiment again. It was a new sensation
to him, to find himself quietly studied and calmly measured by those
thoughtful blue eyes; he felt, with his fine, instinctive tact, that
the soul within was infolded in some crystalline sphere of protection,
transparent, but adamantine, so that he could not touch it. What was
that secret poise, that calm, immutable centre on which she rested, that
made her, in her rustic simplicity, so unapproachable and so strong?

Burr remembered once finding in his grandfather's study, among a mass of
old letters, one in which that great man, in early youth, described his
future wife, then known to him only by distant report. With his keen
natural sense of everything fine and poetic, he had been struck with
this passage, as so beautifully expressing an ideal womanhood, that he
had in his earlier days copied it in his private _recueil_.

"They say," it ran, "that there is a young lady who is beloved of that
Great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain
seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible,