After a minute’s further conversation, he departed, and went home to breakfast, without having asked for Emily, or seen Muriel. To tell the truth, a feeling of trepidation—a sense of some gathering mystery which made his heart tremble—had grown upon Harrington since he had left Emily the day before, and he shrank in spirit from meeting her or Muriel. He felt darkly that something of import, closely affecting him, remained undisclosed in the mutual relations of himself and his friends. The words of Wentworth—“because it has been played upon”—rang in his memory like a bell. Undoubtedly, Harrington would have unriddled the mystery almost as quickly as Muriel had done, but the blundering avowal of Wentworth that he was Muriel’s betrothed, stood in the way of his sight, and baffled him. Restless; ill at ease; unwilling to think upon the subject, which yet persisted in invading his mind; and in that state of nervous incertitude, in which mysterious agitations and sudden tinglings of the blood incessantly visit the frame, it was a positive relief to Harrington to get away from himself, among the cheerful, familiar faces around the Captain’s table. The family were assembled in the dining-room, which opened off the kitchen. A pleasant, old-fashioned room, looking on the street, and furnished with plain, old-fashioned, homely furniture. Curtains of white dimity to the windows; a semi-circular stand, holding rows of flower-pots, at one of them, from which the smell of geraniums and roses was shed throughout the apartment; the floor covered with a woven rag-carpet of soberly gay colors; a bureau, spread with white linen at one side, with the miniature model of a ship full-rigged, upon it; straight-backed mahogany chairs, with horsehair seats; two rocking chairs, with white tidies on their backs; a looking-glass between the windows, and on the opposite wall, on either side of the mantel, two portraits, fearfully bad, of the Captain and his wife. The Captain, however, regarded these works of art with complacent satisfaction, and held them as chief among his household treasures. The wandering country artist who had executed them, had represented the Captain as a dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked, staring, marine Adonis, preternaturally blooming in complexion, attired in an indigo blue coat with brass buttons, a buff waistcoat, and a frilled shirt-front, and grasping a spy-glass in one hand and a quadrant in the other. To match this artistic triumph, Mrs. Fisher appeared with sky-blue eyes, lily-white complexion, pink cheeks and lips, an azure dress with a huge broach, and a gold chain and pencil-case, on which the artist had spent his finest genius and his brightest chrome. To trace a resemblance between the portrait, and the kind, quiet, pale-eyed, colorless little woman in a gauze cap, who sat at the head of the breakfast-table, would have been more difficult than to establish a similar likeness between the other portrait and the Captain.