In all that time we have no data whatever for declaring the state of affairs existing between Halstead Rowan and the lady whose auburn hair had lain for those few blissful moments on his breast. Probably no explicit love-declaration had passed between them; and Mrs. Vanderlyn and her arrogant son were sufficiently familiar with all the modes by which those who wish to be together can be kept apart, to prevent any of those dangerous "opportunities" which might otherwise have brought an immediate _mesalliance_ upon the stately house of Vanderlyn. If the would-be lovers met, they only met beneath watchful eyes; and Halstead Rowan, who had already displayed that amount of dash and recklessness in personal exposure indicating that an elopement down the mountain roads, with a flying horse beneath him and his arm around the lady's waist, would have been the most congenial thing in life to his nature,--even had Clara Vanderlyn been weak enough to yield to such a proposal, bore all the while within him too much of the true gentleman to lower himself by a runaway alliance, or to compromise the character of the woman he wished to make his wife by wedding her otherwise than in the face of all who dared raise a word of opposition. So there seemed--heigho, for this world of disappointments, hindrances, and incongruities!--little prospect that any thing more could result from the meetings that had already been so eventful, than an early and final parting, and two lives shadowed by one long regret that the fates had not ordained otherwise. But little more can be said of the fortunes, during those two days, of Horace Townsend and the lady of the proud eyes and the winning smile. Two or three times they had met and conversed, but only for a moment, and they had by no means ever returned again to the sudden cordiality and confidence of that first morning. Something in the manner of Margaret Hayley seemed to give token that she was frightened at the position she had assumed and the emotions of her own heart (might she not well have been--she who but a month or two before had been clasped to the breast of an accepted lover and believed that she held towards him a life-long devotion?); and something in the demeanor of Horace Townsend quite as conclusively showed that he was treading ground of the solidity of which he was doubtful, and impelled to utter words that could not be spoken without sacrificing the whole truth of his manhood! Captain Hector Coles had believed his name an assumed one and looked after the initials on his handkerchief to satisfy himself of the fact; and the reader has found reason to believe that there was really an assumption: did that departure from truth already begin to assert its penalty, when he was brought into contact with a woman who showed her own candor so magnificently? Strange problems, that will be solved eventually without any aid from the imagination.