“Indeed!” exclaimed Miss Haviland, in a tone of joyful surprise; which the next instant, however, gave way to one of embarrassment. “Why, I heard--have written, indeed, under the belief that--and perhaps----Barty, I think, on the whole, I will not send that billet now.” As Bart heard these last words of the fair speaker, so inconsistent with all which both her words and manner had just expressed, he looked up with a stare of surprise to her face, now sufficiently revealed, by the glancing light standing near her in the room, to betray its varying expressions. But, as he ran his keen gray eyes over her hesitating and slightly confused countenance, he soon seemed to read the secret cause of her sudden change of purpose, arising from that curious and beautiful trait in woman's heart, which, by some gush of awakened sympathy, often unfolds all the lurking secrets of the breast, but which, when the cause of that sympathy is removed, closes up the avenue, and conceals them from view, in the cold reserve of shrinking delicacy--the colder and more impenetrable in proportion as the disclosure has been complete. “O, yes, I will carry it,” said Bart, pretending to misunderstand the other, while he pocketed the billet and began to glide down the ladder. “No,” commenced Miss Haviland; “no, Bart, I said----” “Yes, yes, I will have it there in a jiffy,” interrupted Bart, hastening his descent, and the next instant dodging away in the dark beneath the foot of the ladder. “Well, let it go,” said the foiled and somewhat mortified maiden to herself, after the disappearance of her strange visitor. “If what I expressed, when I thought him dying, was right and proper, it cannot be very wrong now.”