bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,-- "All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight," and constant as the magnet to its poles. It was still the steps of Eloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow, he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes; to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose essence told all his philosophy:--"The great error in government," he said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government, individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union." Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening, as Marlboro' thus harangued Eloise. "Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all oppose." "Nullification is a good solvent." "A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the horizon, man!" "What are you talking about, politics or marriage?" "God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr. St. George, bowing to Eloise; "and as to the last,--I'll none of it!" And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Eloise was about to ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face. "What has that _contrabandista_ been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St. George. Eloise looked ignorantly up. "Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says, when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let us make the best of it!" "Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?" "For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.