When Horace Townsend came out late from supper that evening, after a meal at which the succulent steaks, the flaky tea-biscuit and the sweet little mountain strawberries had not been quite so fully enjoyed as they might have been with a little additional company at table,--harp, horn and violin were again sounding in the long parlors, as they had been the evening before, and much more attention was being paid to them than when the full moon was their momentary rival. Perhaps not less than half the beauty, grace and gallantry then assembled at the Profile, were gathered under the flashing lights, dancing, promenading, flirting, and generally floating down the pleasant stream of moderate watering-place dissipation. The Russian "Redowa" was sounding from brass and string as he entered the long parlor from the hall; and among the figures sweeping proudly by to that most voluptuous of measures, he instantly recognized two whose identity could not indeed have been very well mistaken under any circumstances. The larger and coarser figure wore on one of its hands a glove several sizes too large--one, indeed, that might have been constructed by some glove-maker of the Titan period: Halstead Rowan was whirling Clara Vanderlyn lazily around in the dance. The strange introduction of the morning, then, had already produced its effect, and the possible romance to be built out of that rescue was coming on quite as rapidly as even a sensation novelist could have anticipated. Horace Townsend, whose eyes seemed to be wandering in search of some face or figure which did not fall under their view, but who had been gazing with undisguised admiration, for some hours the previous day, on those of this very Clara Vanderlyn--Horace Townsend thought, as he saw the manly arm of Rowan spanning the pliant white-robed waist of his partner, that seldom could the old illustration of the rugged oak and the clinging ivy be better supplied,--and that if fate and fortune had set, as they too evidently seemed to have done, an eternal bar between the two, they had predestined to remain apart one couple whom the fitness of nature would certainly have joined. His frank, hearty, manly energy, deficient in some of the finer cultures and at times approaching to roughness, and her gentle, womanly tenderness, with almost too much of delicate refinement, seemed mentally to blend in the thought of the future and of the children likely to spring from such a union, as physically stood in relief and pleasing contrast the close-curled dark hair and the shower of waving gold.