And another answered: "Oh, he's got some new notion into his head, I reckon! goin' on a cruise, may be!" Rebecca was going out with a girl companion, talking rather loudly. I was moved to take her hand a moment, gently detaining her. She looked exceedingly bright and pretty. Her physical beauty was perfect, yet I believed that the soul was only half awakened in the girl. So as I held her hand a moment, with the others taking noisy leave about us, I looked into her face with what she might have read as: "Weren't you laughing rather loudly, my dear? I can see now that you are not so happy as you would have people believe. Why not confide in me, and let me straighten your difficulty out for you?" But Rebecca's eyes were downcast, and her cheeks crimson. She let her hand slip passively out of mine, and passed on, without a word. CHAPTER IX. LOVELL "POPS THE QUESTION." One morning, ere we had breakfasted at the Ark, Lovell Barlow, like some new-fangled orb of day, was seen to surmount the ruddy verge of the horizon. He bore a gun upon his shoulders, and advanced with a singularly martial and self-confident tread. As he entered the Ark, he placed the gun against the wall, and sat down and folded his arms, and looked as though he could be brave without it. "Well, Madeline," said he, with a determined gaze fixed straight before him on vacuity, and with a desperate affectation of spontaneity in his tone--"Well, Madeline, mother and father have gone to Aunt Marcia's, _I_ suppose to spend a week, _I_ suppose--ahem!--ahem!--_I_ suppose so." "You don't say so, Lovell!" exclaimed Madeline. "And what'll poor Robin do now, Lovell? Oh, what'll poor Robin do now?" "Yes," said he gravely; "that's what _they_ thought, ahem! _They_ thought they should stay a week, _they_ thought so, certainly." "Wall, I declar' for't, Lovell," said Grandma; "now's the time you'd ought to have a wife. Jest to think how comf'table 'twould be fu ye, now, instead of stayin' there all alone, if ye only had a nice little wife to home, to cook for ye, and watch for ye, and keep ye company, and----" "_I_ think so," exclaimed Lovell, giving a quick glance backward in the direction of his gun. "Certainly, ahem! _I_ think so. _I_ do." "Lookin' for game? Eh, Lovell?" inquired Grandpa. "Pa," said Grandma, solemnly: "I wish you'd put another stick of wood in the stove." Grandpa was awake now, and a youthful and satanic gleam shone from under his shaggy eyebrows; he glanced at me, too, as was his habit on such occasions, as though I had a sort of sympathy for and fellowship with him in his bold iniquities of speech. But the guileless Lovell interpreted not the deeper meaning of Grandpa's words. "I think some of it, Cap'n," he answered unsmilingly, and then continued: "It's been--ahem!--it's been a very mild winter on the--ahem!--I should say on the Cape. It's been a very mild winter on the Cape, Miss Hungerford."