ft lying on the table, with the
superscription upward. Then Colonel Egbert Crawford put on his hat,
walked deliberately down-stairs and out at the front of the house. No
one seemed to observe him--not even a domestic, and probably nothing
would have pleased him better at that moment. Walking down the lane to
the road, he turned up the road to the left, went up to a little country
tavern where he had sometimes hired a riding-horse on previous visits,
and hired a horse and buggy, with a driver, to go at once to Utica. Ten
minutes completed the negotiation, and ten more harnessed up the horse
to the vehicle; so that before the call to dinner was made at the
Crawford mansion, before old John Crawford was assisted in from the
portico, or Mary thought of the arbiter of her destiny as elsewhere than
in his own room,--he was bowling down the dusty road towards Utica. When
the down-train from Suspension Bridge left Utica for Albany that
afternoon, the detected and beaten gambler in reputations, lives and
matrimonial ventures, was a passenger.

CHAPTER XXV.

AFFAIRS IN THE CRAWFORD FAMILY IN NEW YORK--THE TWO BROTHERS--MARION
HOBART THE ENIGMA--NIAGARA BY WAY OF THE CENTRAL PARK.

It has been already said that John Crawford, wounded, and with the poor
little Virginian orphan-girl in his company, reached New York on the
evening of the Fourth of July--the same evening, it will be remembered,
on which Tom Leslie and Josephine Harris left the city, the one for
Niagara and the other for her matrimonial operations at West Falls. It
is just possible that their not arriving earlier was a lucky event, as
Joe Harris, had she once set eyes on the delicate and singular-looking
Virginian girl, would have been almost certainly attracted towards her,
and in that event her pet hobby for the time might have been
neglected--her departure for the North might have been delayed for a day
or two--and Mary Crawford might have been left to meet her fate in
helplessness and ignorance.

And yet all this is an array of "mights" that have no real propriety,
for events occur but once in the world, and they only occur in one mode.
Human will is free, and human responsibility is never to be ignored; and
still no human hand changes in any degree the inevitable. "Oh, if I
had!" and "Oh, if I had not!" are very common exclamations, and those
who have committed terrible errors or met with severe misfortunes will
continue to make them until the whole co