EXPLANATION.
Six years prior to the commencement of our story New Haven boasted not a better or wealthier citizen than Harcourt Linwood, of whose subsequent failure and death we have heard from Uncle Israel. The great beauty of his only child, Ada, then a girl of nearly thirteen, was the subject of frequent comment among the circle in which he moved. No pains were spared with her education, and many were the conjectures as to what she would be when time had matured her mind and beauty.
Hugh St. Leon, of New Orleans, then nineteen years of age, and a student at Yale, had frequently met Ada at the house of his sister, Mrs. Durant, whose eldest daughter, Jenny, was about her own age. The uncommon beauty of the child greatly interested the young Southerner and once, in speaking of his future prospects to his sister, he playfully remarked, "Suppose I wait for Ada Linwood."
"You cannot do better," was the reply, and the conversation terminated.
The next evening there was to be a child's party at the house of Mrs. Durant, and as Hugh was leaving the house Jenny bounded after him, saying, "Oh, Uncle Hugh, you'll come to-morrow night, won't you? No matter if you are a grown-up man, in the junior class, trying to raise some whiskers! You will be a sort of restraint, and keep us from getting too rude. Besides, we are going to have tableaux, and I want you to act the part of bridegroom in one of the scenes."
"Who is to be the bride?" asked Hugh.
"Ada Linwood. Now I know you'll come, won't you?"
"I'll see," was Hugh's answer, as he walked away.
Jenny well knew that "I'll see" meant "yes," and tying on her bonnet, she hastened off to tell Ada that Uncle Hugh would be present, and would act the part of bridegroom in the scene where she was to be bride.
"What! that big man?" said Ada. "How funny!"
Before seven the next evening Mrs. Durant's parlors were filled, for the guests were not old enough or fashionable enough to delay making their appearance until morning. Hugh was the last to arrive, for which Jenny scolded him soundly, saying they were all ready for tableaus. "But come, now," said she, "and let me introduce you to the bride."
In ten minutes more the curtain rose, and Hugh St. Leon appeared with Ada on his arm, standing before a gentleman in clerical robes, who seemed performing the marriage ceremony. Placing a ring on Ada's third finger, St. Leon, when the whole was finished, took advantage of his new relationship, and kissed the lips of the bride. Amid a storm of applause the curtain dropped, and as he led the blushing Ada away he bent down, and pointing to the ring, whispered, "Wear it until some future day, when, by replacing it, I shall make you really my little wife."
The words were few and lightly spoken, but they touched the heart of the young Ada, awakening within her thoughts and feelings of which she never before had dreamed. Frequently, after that, she met St. Leon, who sometimes teased her about being his wife; but when he saw how painfully embarrassed she seemed on such occasions, he desisted.
The next year he was graduated, and the same day on which he received the highest honors of his class was long remembered with heartfelt sorrow, for ere the city clocks tolled the hour of midnight he stood with his orphaned niece, Jenny, weeping over the inanimate form of his sister, Mrs. Durant, who had died suddenly in a fit of apoplexy. Mr. Durant had been dead some years, and as Jenny had now no relatives in New Haven, she accompanied her uncle to his Southern home. Long and passionately she wept on Ada's bosom as she bade her farewell, promising never to forget her, but to write her three pages of foolscap every week. To do Jenny justice, we must say that this promise was faithfully kept for a whole month, and then, with thousands of its sisterhood, it disappeared into the vale of broken promises and resolutions.
She still wrote occasionally, and at the end of each epistle there was always a long postscript from Hugh, which Ada prized almost as much as she did Jenny's whole letter; and when at last matters changed, the letter becoming Hugh's and the postscript Jenny's, she made no objection, even if she felt any. At the time of her father's failure and death, a long unanswered letter was lying in her portfolio, which was entirely forgotten until weeks after, when, in the home which Uncle Israel so disinterestedly helped them to procure, she and her mother were sewing for the food which they ate. Then a dozen times was an answer commenced, blotted with tears, and finally destroyed, until Ada, burying her face in her mother's lap, sobbed out, "Oh, mother, I cannot do it. I cannot write to tell them how poor we are, for I remember that Jenny was proud, and laughed at the schoolgirls whose fathers were not rich."
So the letter was never answered, and as St. Leon about that time started on a tour through Europe, he knew nothing of their change of circumstances. On his way home he had in Paris met with Harry Graham, who had been his classmate, and who now won from him a promise that on his return to America he would visit his parents, in S——. He did so, and there, as we have seen, met with Ada Harcourt, whose face, voice, and manner reminded him so strangely of the Ada he had known years before, and whom he had never forgotten.
As the reader will have supposed, the sewing-woman whose daughter Lucy Dayton so heartily despised was none other than Mrs. Linwood, of New Haven, who had taken her husband's first name in order to avoid the persecutions of Uncle Israel. The day following the party St. Leon spent in making inquiries concerning Mrs. Harcourt, and the information thus obtained determined him to start at once for New Haven, in order to ascertain if his suspicions are correct.
The result of his journey we already know. Still he resolved not to make himself known immediately, but to wait until he satisfied himself that Ada was as good as beautiful. And then?
A few more chapters will tell us what then.