"I will throw the marriage mantle over her. She will need me now!"
"But you would not take a wife out of such a situation?"
"Oh! yes. She will be as handsome as ever, and only half as proud."
Duff Salter walked up and down the floor and stroked his long beard, and his usually benevolent expression was now dark and ominous, as if with gloom and anger. He spoke in a low tone as if not aware that he was heard, and his voice sounded as if he also did not hear it, and could not, therefore, give it pitch or intonation:
"Is this the best of old Kensington? This is the East! Where I dreamed that life was pure as the water from the dear old pump that quenched my thirst in boyhood—not bitter as the alkali of the streams of the plains, nor turbid like the rills of the Arkansas. I pined to leave that life of renegades, half-breeds, squaws, and nomads to bathe my soul in the clear fountains of civilization,—to live where marriage was holy and piety sincere. I find, instead, mystery, blood, dishonor, hypocrisy, and shame. Let me go back! The rough frontier suits me best. If I can hear so much wickedness, deaf as I am, let me rather be an unsocial hermit in the woods, hearing nothing lower than thunder!"
As Duff Salter went to his dinner that day he looked at Agnes sitting in her place, so ill at ease, and said to himself,
"It is true."
Another matter of concern was on Mr. Duff Salter's mind—his serving-man. Such an unequal servant he had never seen—at times full of intelligence and snap, again as dumb as the bog-trotters of Ireland.
"What was the matter with you yesterday?" asked the deaf man of Mike one day.