“Thus it is,” she said, “that one’s most sensitive feelings are thrown back upon the heart. My own mother refuses me her blessing; but I can define the reason—the hidden, mysterious reason.” This intensified female gathered the opera-cloak around her as if it had been a Roman toga, and sailed out of the room with the sweep of a wind-mill. Mrs. Halstead shook her handsome old head, and sighed faintly when Eliza disappeared. “Will she never comprehend our position?” she murmured. “Never remember that the bloom of girlhood does not run through mid-age? How good they are to overlook all this.” CHAPTER IV. THE FAIR. An old man sat alone in one of those large, old-fashioned houses, which have been almost driven out of existence by the march of commerce into the haunts of fashion. The rooms were broad, deep, and well lighted; for there was plenty of land around the old house, which was half occupied by the remnants of an old-fashioned garden, in which two or three quince trees might be seen from the side windows, covered with plump, orange-tinted fruit in the late autumn, but gnarled and knotted old skeletons, as they appeared to their owner that frosty afternoon. The room in which this man sat was large, old-fashioned, and gloomy enough. A Brussels carpet, worn in places till the linen foundation broke through the faded pattern, was stretched upon the floor without quite covering it, and a breadth of striped stair-carpeting eked out the deficiency, running along the footboards in meagre imitation of a cordon. A ponderous old sideboard of solid mahogany, which contained a multitude of drawers and shelves for every thing, stood in a recess by the fireplace. On this were decanters with silver caps; and tiny silver shields hung around their necks, telling what manner of spirits was imprisoned within, bespeaking the old-fashioned hospitality of forty years ago; and over the sideboard hung a picture from some Dutch artist in which bunches of carrots, heads of cabbages, birds, newly shot, and fish ready for the pan, were heaped together in sumptuous profusion. It was a fine appetizing kitchen scene, in which a few marigolds and hollyhocks had been thrown, as tasteful market-men sometimes cast a handful of coarse flowers on a customer’s basket. Some mahogany chairs, with well-worn horse-hair seats, stood against the wall; and a stiff, spindle-legged sofa, covered with the same useful material, occupied a recess near the fireplace, like that filled by the sideboard.