Hollins, who
withdrew from Harvard in his second year and read law assiduously in the
office of Winthrop & Lawrence, and then went abroad for his health. They
returned on the Cunarder in the early part of April, and Mrs. Winthrop
was ill from the time she set foot on the saloon deck until they sighted
the State House looming through the fog, and nothing could have been
more fortunate than that Mr. Hollins was with them--he was so attentive,
so very thoughtful. When he wasn't doing something for her he was
promenading with Viva on deck or bundling that young lady in warm wraps
and hedging her in a sunny corner. Pity that Mr. Hollins was so poor and
rather obscure in his family--his immediate family--connections. His
mother was Mr. Winthrop's first cousin, and she had been very fond of
Mr. Winthrop when she was a child, and he had befriended her son when a
friend was needed. She died years ago, and no one knew just when her
husband followed her. He was a person no one ever met, said Mrs.
Winthrop, a man who had a singular career, was an erratic genius, and
very dissipated. But he was a very fascinating person, she understood,
in his younger days, and his son was most talented and deserving, but
entirely out of the question as an intimate or associate. Viva would not
be apt to see anything of him after their return; but the question never
seemed to occur to her, how much had the daughter been influenced by
their frequent companionship abroad? It really mattered nothing. Viva
was to marry Revere Abbot, as Mrs. Winthrop preferred to call him, and
such was distinctly the family understanding. Miss Winthrop had been
home but a few weeks when all the North was thrilled by the stirring
call for volunteers, and the old Bay State responded, as was to be
expected of her. In the --th Massachusetts were a score of officers, as
has been said, whose names were as old as the colony and whose family
connections made them thoroughly well known to each other at the
earliest organization of the command. That Paul Abbot should be among
the first to seek a commission as a junior lieutenant was naturally
expected. Then with all possible hesitancy and delicacy, after a
feminine council in the family, his mother asked him if he did not think
there ought to be some distinct understanding about Viva Winthrop before
he went away to the front. The matter was something that he had thought
of before she went to Europe, but believed then that it could wa