I cannot tell how this strange repetition of the advice which I had already heard so often, overpowered me. Where was the opportunity for my following my father's example? I saw no circumstances at all like his in the promise of my life. I could not suspect any compassion in Harry's regard for me. It was pure, manly affection, and no feigning. I felt as if all this was a conspiracy to drive me into the very suspiciousness from which they sought to guard me. What temper must I be of when everybody thought these cautions necessary; I felt humiliated and degraded by the constant counsel. The tears gathered in my eyes--large tears of mortification and bitterness--but my pride was roused at the same time, and they did not fall. All this while, when I was swallowing down as I best could the sob in my throat, my father looked at me steadily, then he suddenly threw the shawl over me again. "I did not think, Hester, that you had been like your mother," he said, in a tone so cold and rigid that I saw at once it was the extreme control he exercised over some violent and passionate emotion which alone could express itself in these tones, and then he stooped, kissed my forehead gently, and began once more with hasty and irregular steps to pace the room from end to end. I stood where he had left me for a moment, and then I left the room and retired to my own. The sun was rising higher--the world was all astir--it was very near the time. I went back and sat down at my chamber window to wait for the hour. Alice would not leave me; she remained in the room wandering about in a restless state of excitement, dressed and ready, but she did not speak, nor disturb my thoughts; and Harry had now arrived and was with my father, she told me--but that made no impression on my abstracted mood. I sat as in a dream, looking out upon all these familiar objects; there seemed to me a languid pause of expectation upon everything. I myself, as still as if I had been in a trance, watched at the window; but my senses were nervously quick and vivid. I thought I heard every step and movement below--and long before anybody else heard them, I felt that this was Mr. Osborne and the young lady, who was to be my bridesmaid, who alighted at the outer door, and came gaily talking through the close--then I knew that the time of my reverie was over. When Alice left me to bring Miss Osborne upstairs, I tried to shake myself free from my lethargy--it required an effort. I felt like the enchanted lady in the tale, as if I had been fixed in that magic chair, and could have slept there for a hundred years.