It is not easy to describe the scene in the parlor which followed the _denouement_ that has been so feebly pictured. The music sounded on, but the set remained unformed and no one seemed to heed it. The room was instantly full of conversation in regard to the strange event, more or less loud in its tone. Frank Vanderlyn, calculating upon the sympathies of a company principally composed of wealthy and fashionable people, looked around him as if for approbation of what he had done, but did not appear to receive it. It was not difficult for him to read in the faces near him that the sympathies of the whole company were with the insulted person, most of the members of it, if they had no other reason for the feeling, remembering the event of the bear-stakes in the morning and thinking that if the Illinoisan was to receive any thing from the Vanderlyn family that day, it should have been gratitude instead of insult. Made painfully aware of this state of feeling, the young man paled, bit his lips, then passed rapidly out of the room and disappeared, leaving his sister still in the attitude of outraged sensibility and mortification, which she retained, uttering no word to any one and not even casting a glance around the room, until Mrs. Vanderlyn, who had apparently constituted herself the reserve force for the attack upon her daughter's dignity which Frank had so gallantly led, swept up from below and led her unresistingly away up the stair-case to their apartments. The set was finally formed, and a few more figures were danced in the parlor of the Profile that evening; but the painful incident just recorded had dulled the sense of enjoyment, and the company thinned out and eventually dispersed to earlier beds than they might have found under other circumstances. CHAPTER XV. HOW HALSTEAD ROWAN ARRANGED THAT EXPECTED DUEL--TEN-PINS VERSUS BLOODSHED--SOME ANXIETY ABOUT IDENTITY--THE "H. T." INITIALS, AGAIN--A FAREWELL TO THE BROOKS CUNNINGHAMES--AN HOUR ON ECHO LAKE, WITH A RHAPSODY AND A STRANGELY-INTERESTED LISTENER. This chapter must be unavoidably as fragmentary, not to say desultory, as some that have preceded it at considerable distance, the course of events in it seeming to partake in some degree of the broken, heaped and heterogeneous quality of the mountain rocks amidst which they occurred.