“How beautiful! What a very handsome woman?” the sister exclaimed at sight of the pictured face. “You are correct. She is, moreover, a thorough lady, and highly-educated. Ridgeley will have a queenly mistress. The likeness is considered faithful, but it does not do her justice.” He took it from Mabel, and they scanned it together; she resting against his shoulder. She felt his chest heave twice; heard him swallow spasmodically in the suppression of some mighty emotion, and the palpable effort drew her very near to him. She never doubted from that moment, what she had more cause in after days to believe, that he loved the woman he had won with a fervor of passion that seemed foreign to his temperament as the evidence of it was to his conduct. The September sun was near the horizon, and between the bowed shutters one slender, gilded arrow shot athwart the portrait, producing a marvellous and sinister change in its expression. The large, limpid eyes became shallow and cunning; the smile lurking about the mouth was the more treacherous and deadly for its sweetness; while the burnished coils of hair brushed away from the temples had the opaline tints and sinuous roll of a serpent. Mabel shrank back before the horror of the absurd imagination. Winston raised the picture to his lips. “My peerless one!” CHAPTER III. -- UNWHOLESOME VAPORS. “DORRANCE!” repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the leading incidents of her brother's wooing. “She lives near Boston, you say, and her mother is a widow?” “Yes. What have you ever heard about her?” “Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name--but very foolishly! I once knew a family of Dorrances--New Yorkers--but the father, a retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were married. The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older than you judge the original of the miniature to be.” “She is not more than twenty-two, at the most,” Mabel was sure. Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not “quiescent.” The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed. “There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then? or something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have been relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a common one to my ears.” “Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition. I should be very sorry--” He stopped. Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness. “Was not the family respectable?”