CHAPTER VII.

WASSAIL.





ALMOST sixteen months had passed since the dewless September
morning, when Mabel had gathered roses in the garden walks, and her
brother's return had shaken the dew with the bloom from her young
heart. It was the evening of Christmas-day, and the tide of wassail,
the blaze of yule, were high at Ridgeley. Without, the fall of snow
that had commenced at sundown, was waxing heavier and the wind
fiercer. In-doors, fires roared and crackled upon every hearth;
there was a stir of busy or merry life in every room. About the
spacious fire-place in the "baronial" hall was a wide semicircle of
young people, and before that in the parlor, a cluster of elders,
whose graver talk was enlivened, from time to time, by the peals of
laughter that tossed into jubilant surf the stream of the juniors'
converse.

Nearest the mantel, on the left wing of the line, sat the three
months' bride, Imogene Barksdale, placid, dove-eyed, and smiling as
of yore, very comely with her expression of satisfied prettiness
nobody called vanity, and bedecked in her "second day's dress" of
azure silk and her bridal ornaments. Her husband hovered on the
outside of the ring, now pulling the floating curls of a girl-cousin