"Married! brother!" starting up in amazement. "You are not in
earnest!"

"I should not jest upon such a theme," replied Winston, in grave
rebuke. "My plans are definitely laid. It is not my purpose to keep
them secret a day longer. I meant to communicate them to yourself
and Mrs. Sutton this afternoon, but yours claimed precedence."

Mabel sat down again, totally confounded, and struggling hard with
her tears. The thought of her brother's marriage was not in itself
disagreeable. She had often lamented his insensibility to the
attractions of such women as she fancied would add to his happiness,
and grace the high place to which his wife would be exalted. She
never liked to hear him called invulnerable; repelled the hypothesis
of his incurable bachelorhood as derogatory to his heart and head.
This unlooked-for intelligence, had it reached her in a different
way, would have delighted as much as it astonished her. The fear
lest her consent to wed Frederic and leave Ridgeley might be the
occasion of discomfort and sadness to her forsaken brother had
shadowed all her visions of future bliss. She ought to have hailed
with unmixed satisfaction the certainty that he would not miss her
sisterly ministrations, or feel the need of her companionship in
that of one nearer and dearer than was his child-ward. She had
striven not to resent even in her own mind, his cavalier treatment
of her lover; had hearkened respectfully and without demur to his
unsympathizing calculations of what was possible and what feasible
in the project of her union with the man of her choice. For how
could he know anything of the palpitations, the anxieties, the
raptures of love, when he was a stranger to the touch of a kindred