Unwholesome Vapors

"Dorrance!" repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she
rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the
leading incidents of her brother's wooing. "She lives near Boston,
you say, and her mother is a widow?"

"Yes. What have you ever heard about her?"

"Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name--but very foolishly!
I once knew a family of Dorrances--New Yorkers--but the father, a
retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were
married. The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older
than you judge the original of the miniature to be."

"She is not more than twenty-two, at the most," Mabel was sure.

Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her
curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not
"quiescent." The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.

"There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then?
or something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have
been relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a
common one to my ears."

"Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition. I
should be very sorry--"

He stopped.

Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness.

"Was not the family respectable?"

"Perfectly, my shrewd little catechist!" seeming to shake off an
uncomfortable incubus, as he laughed down at her serious face. "They
vaunted themselves upon the antiquity of their line, and were more
liberal in allusions to departed grandeur than was quite well-bred.
When I knew them they were not wealthy, or in what they would have
called 'society.' Indeed, the mother kept a private boarding-house
near the law-school I attended. There were several sons--very
decent, enterprising fellows. But one lived at home, and a daughter,
the wife of a lieutenant in the navy, whom I never saw. I boarded
with them for six months, or thereabout."