Mabel did not look around; apparently did not observe that she
walked on alone.

"I dare say she would not miss me for the next mile!" soliloquized
the idle lounger, snatching foam-flakes from their nestling-places
behind the rocks, and watching them as they danced down the stream.

Something, whiter and more regular in shape than they, lay upon the
margin of the brook, partly concealed by a clump of sedge. A letter,
with the address uppermost! Rosa's optics were keen. She easily made
out the direction upon the envelope from where she stood. It was
Frederic Chilton's name in Mrs. Sutton's quaint, old-fashioned
"back-hand" chirography. An hour before, as Rosa now recollected,
she had seen, from her window, a negro man take the path to the
village, arranging some papers in the crown of his tattered straw
hat. He had dropped this, the most important of all, probably in
stooping to drink from his hollowed palms at the spring-stream.
However this might be, there it lay--the warning to the calumniated
lover that his traducers were making clean (or foul) work with his
fair fame in the quarter where he wished to stand at his best;
perhaps citing him to appear and answer the damaging charges in
person before the same tribunal.

"If she would only let me drop him a friendly line asking him, for
her sake, to contradict this horrid slander!" the distraught matron
had sighed, last night, in her recapitulation of the conversation
with her obdurate niece. "But she will not hear of it."

"I hardly think he would like it either," Rosa had rejoined. "It
would hint at distrust on your part or on hers. Mr. Aylett's letter