CHAPTER III

UNWHOLESOME VAPORS.





"DORRANCE!" repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she
rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the
leading incidents of her brother's wooing. "She lives near Boston,
you say, and her mother is a widow?"

"Yes. What have you ever heard about her?"

"Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name--but very foolishly!
I once knew a family of Dorrances--New Yorkers--but the father, a
retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were
married. The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older
than you judge the original of the miniature to be."

"She is not more than twenty-two, at the most," Mabel was sure.

Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her
curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not
"quiescent." The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.

"There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then?
or something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have
been relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a