she was thirteen."

"When is he expected to return?"

"About Christmas."

"Ah, yes! You told me! She is very young to be married."

"Yes; but we do marry our girls very young when everything else is
suitable--as in this case," smiled Mr. Force.

"But after three years of separation from the youth whom she parted with
in her childhood, may not your daughter have changed her mind?"

"Oh, no!" earnestly replied the father.

"But you cannot know this until the young pair meet again. Suppose now,
for instance, that when Miss Force sees the youth she may not like the
idea of marrying him? What, in such a case, would be your line of
policy?"

"I should have no policy. My dear daughter's happiness should be my first
consideration, and the marriage could not go on."

"Exactly. That is just what I should expect of you," said the colonel,
approvingly.

"Good fellow!" thought, honest Abel Force, admiringly.

"But such is not likely to be the case, colonel. She is quite fond of him
as he is of her."

"Quite so," assented the colonel, as they turned and walked toward the
house.

On reaching it, Mr. Force went in; but Col. Anglesea excused himself, and
remained on the outside. He wanted to walk up and down.

Here was the very heiress he had been in search of right under his eyes
all the time, and he had never seen her. He had thought her a child of
about fourteen years of age, and here she was sixteen, and considered
marriageable.

How precocious these young American girls were, to be sure! How very early
they were married!

At this point the colonel lighted a fresh cigar, strolled out upon the
frozen lawn, and sat down on a rustic seat, under the branches of an old
yew tree, from which he had a view of the bay, that here spread out from
the foot of the hill to the distant horizon.

It was not, however, to look at the prospect of nature before his eyes,
but to contemplate the prospect of the future in his imagination, that he
sat there, and smoked and reflected.

"The game is in my own hands," he said to himself. "The daughter is
governed entirely by the mother, whom she adores. And she must appear to
act from her own free will and for her own pleasure, in order to obtain
the consent of her father, who, forsooth, will sacrifice his own family
ambition to his child's happiness.

"This is the third of December," he mused, "and the young fellow is
expected to be home at Christmas. There is no time to be lost. I