Tom Barksdale and Mabel were pacing the portico from end to end,
chatting with the cheerful familiarity of old friends. Catching some
of thin energetic sentence, Mabel looked over her shoulder.
"Who of us is fated to be pitied, did you say, Rosa dear?"
"Never yourself!" was the curt reply. "Rest content with that
assurance."
Her restless fingers began to gather the red leaves that already
variegated the foliage of the creeper shading the porch. Strangely
indisposed to answer her animadversions upon the world's judgment of
her sex, or to acknowledge the implied compliment to his betrothed,
Frederic watched the lithe, dark hands, as they overflowed with the
vermilion trophies of autumn. The September sunshine sifted through
the vines in patches upon the floor; the low laughter and blended
voices of the four talkers; the echo of Tom's manly tread, and
Mabel's lighter footfall, were all jocund music, befitting the
brightness of the day and world. What was the spell by which this
pettish girl who stood by him, her luminous eyes fixed in sardonic
melancholy upon the promenaders, while she rubbed the dying leaves
into atoms between her palms--had stamped scenes and sounds with
immortality, yet thrilled him with the indefinite sense of unreality
and dread one feels in scanning the lineaments of the beloved dead?
Had her nervous folly infected him? What absurd phantasy was hers,
and what his concern in her whims?
A stifled cry from Mabel aroused him to active attention. A
gentlemen had stepped from the house upon the piazza, and after
bending to kiss her, was shaking hands with her companions.
"The Grand Mogul!" muttered Rosa, with a comic grimace, and not
offering to stir in the direction of the stranger.
In another moment Mabel had led him up to her lover, and introduced,
in her pretty, ladylike way, and bravely enough, considering her
blushes, "Mr. Chilton" to "my brother, Mr. Winston Aylett."