Poor Mrs. Graham was little aware of what awaited her. She could not be called a woman of very high principles, but she had more feeling, and, of course, more experience than Jane. When she discovered the true state of things, she was very much shocked. She had never had the least idea of what had been going on around her; far from it, indeed, she had never for a moment doubted that, before long, her daughter would become the wife of young Hazlehurst. Little by little she gathered the whole truth from the weeping Jane. It appeared that the two or three meetings which had taken place between Jane and young Taylor, just before he sailed, had been sufficient for him to fancy himself in love with her. He made a confidante of his sister Adeline, who, as one of the older class in her boarding-school, considered all love-affairs as belonging to her prerogative. Her friend, Miss Hunter, was a regular graduate of the Court of Love, according to the code--not of Toulouse--but of a certain class of school-girls in New-York. This young lady had gone through the proper training from her cradle, having been teased and plagued about beaux and lovers, before she could walk alone. She had had several love-affairs of her own before she was fifteen. "All for love," was her motto; and it was a love which included general flirtation as the spice of unmarried life, and matrimony with any individual whatever, possessing a three-story house in Broadway, as the one great object of existence. Adeline had, of course, profited by such companionship; and, at the time her brother confessed himself in love with Miss Graham, after having met once on board a steamboat, and once at an evening party, she was fully equal to take the management of the whole affair into her own hands. It is true, young Taylor had entered into a boyish engagement at college; but that was thought no obstacle whatever. She delighted in passing her brother's compliments over to Jane; in reporting to him her friend's blushes and smiles. With this state of things, young Taylor sailed for Europe; but Adeline gloried too much in her capacity of confidante, to allow the matter to drop: not a letter was written but contained some allusion to the important subject. In the course of the year she had talked Jane into quite a favourable state of feeling towards her brother; he would probably himself have forgotten the affair, had not Miss Graham arrived in Paris at the moment she did.