We girls used to wonder what the lovers talked about while they waited
for the traitor. Ellen Dale always said they were foolish to wait. "Why
didn't they go right off?" said Ellen. "If I were going to elope, I
shouldn't bother to get married. But, oh, think of how they felt when in
walked those cruel parents!"

The story was that they were torn weeping from each other's arms; that
Letty was sent to bed for two days on bread and water; that Alfred was
packed off to Philadelphia the very next morning, and sailed in less
than a week. They did not see each other again.

But the end of the story was not romantic at all. Letty, although she
crept about for a while in deep disgrace, and brooded upon death--that
interesting impossibility, so dear to youth,--_married_, if you please!
when she was twenty, and went away to live. When Alfred came back, seven
years later, he got married, too. He married a Miss Barkley. He used to
go away on long voyages, so perhaps he wasn't really fond of her. We
tried to think so, for we liked Captain Price.

In our day Captain Price was a widower. He had given up the sea, and
settled down to live in Old Chester; his son, Cyrus, lived with him, and
his languid daughter-in-law--a young lady of dominant feebleness, who
ruled the two men with that most powerful domestic rod--foolish
weakness. This combination in a woman will cause a mountain (a masculine
mountain) to fly from its firm base; while kindness, justice, and good
sense leave it upon unshaken foundations of selfishness. Mrs. Cyrus was
a Goliath of silliness; when billowing black clouds heaped themselves in
the west on a hot afternoon, she turned pale with apprehension, and the
Captain and Cyrus ran for four tumblers, into which they put the legs of
her bed, where, cowering among the feathers, she lay cold with fear and