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 should be sufficient to elicit the defence you crave.” “You are in the right, perhaps!” But Mrs. Sutton had looked miserably discontented. “Yet to be frank with you, Rosa, Winston is not apt to be conciliatory in his measures when he takes it into his head that the family honor is assailed. I am afraid he has written haughtily, if not insolently, to poor Frederic.” Rosa had no doubt of this, even while she answered, “Neither haughtiness nor downright insolence would prevent a man who has so much at stake as has Mr. Chilton, from taking instant steps to re-establish himself in the respect of the family he desires to enter. This is a very delicate matter--take what view of it we may. Hadn't you better wait a few days before you interfere? Nothing can be lost--something may be gained by prudent delay.” “And I suppose Winston WOULD be very much displeased at my officiousness, as he would term it,” had been Mrs. Sutton's reluctant concession to her young guest's discreet counsels. “But it is very hard to remain quiet, and see everything going to destruction about one!” She had evidently reconsidered her resolution to let things take their wrong-headed course, and in virtue of her prerogatives as match-maker and mender, had thrust her oar into the very muddy whirlpool boiling about the bark of her darling's happiness.