have declared that it would be fraught with unalloyed rapture. I was
happier yesterday than I am to-day. It is not merely that we must
part to-morrow, or that your brother's precautionary measures and
disapproval of what has passed between us have acted like a
shower-bath to the fervor of my newly born hopes. I am willing that
my life should be subjected to the utmost rigor of his researches,
and another month, at farthest, will reunite us. Nor do I believe in
presentiments. I am more inclined to attribute the uneasiness that
has hovered over me all the day to physical causes. We will call it
a mild splenetic case, induced by the sultry weather, and the very
slow on coming of the storm presaged by your dewless roses."

He laughed naturally and pleasantly. Having confessed to what he
regarded as a ridiculous succumbing of his buoyant spirit to
atmospheric influences, he shook off the nightmare as if it had
never sat upon him.

Mabel was grave still.

"There is something weirdly oppressive in the night," she said, in a
low, awed tone. "But the burden you describe has weighed me down
since morning. While Rosa was singing, I felt suddenly removed from
you by a horrid gulf. What if all this should be the preparation to
us for some impending danger?"

"Sweet! these are unwholesome vapors of the imagination. Nothing can
be a disaster that leaves us to one another," was the text of
Frederic's fond soothing; and by the time Mrs. Sutton descended from
her chamber of meditation, to remind Imogene that the seeds of ague
and fever lurked in the river-fogs, the couple from the piazza came