When her last guest had departed, Mrs. Houston entered the private sitting-room of Margaret Helmstedt, whom she found quietly sitting beside her workstand, engaged in sewing. Taking a seat close beside her, Mrs. Houston said: “Margaret, I have come to request an explanation of your strange conduct of yesterday, which, let me assure you, has given your friends great pain, and even revived all the old gossip of which you were the subject. Margaret, I await your answer.” She looked up from her work, and fixing her dark eyes full upon the face of her catechiser, answered firmly though gently: “Mrs. Houston, I have no explanation to make!” The little lady flushed and bit her lip. Margaret continued her needlework. “Then I am to understand, Miss Helmstedt, that you consider it quite proper for a young lady to spend two or three hours alone in the woods with a soldier, who is not of her kindred?” Margaret might have replied with truth, “No, Mrs. Houston, I do not consider that at all proper,” but she chose, on the contrary, to remain silent. “And you doubtless think, besides, that an affianced bride owes no consideration to her betrothed husband.” “So far from that, I feel that she owes the same as if the church and the state had already blessed and confirmed the engagement,” answered Margaret. “Which, in your case, it will never do, unless certain suspicious acts of yours are satisfactorily explained.” “Mrs. Houston, I do not understand you,” said Margaret, flushing deeply. “You do not seem to know that the honor of Ralph is committed to your keeping!” “Mrs. Houston, the honor of no human being can possibly go out of his own keeping, or into that of another.” The lady still bit her lip in high displeasure; but a glance at the pale, pensive face, and mourning dress of the orphan girl, a sudden recollection of her dead mother, a reflection upon the inevitable misery that any real imprudence might bring upon that mother’s only child, perhaps modified her resentment, for in a kinder tone she said: “Margaret Helmstedt, you are on the brink of a frightful precipice! pause! confide to me the nature of the acquaintance subsisting between yourself and that strange young man, whom you had evidently known previous to your meeting yesterday morning. Is he the person to whom you wrote those mysterious letters? Is he the same whose visit to the island caused your poor mother such keen distress? Was it the dread of your continued intimacy, and possible union with such an unadmissible person, that constrained her to betroth you to Ralph, and consign you to my care? Speak, Margaret! It may be in my power to help and save you!” Margaret trembled through all her frame, but answered firmly: “Dear Mrs. Houston, I thank you for your kindness, but--I have nothing to say!” “Margaret; I adjure you by the memory of your dead mother, speak! explain!”