"Well, you wanted me to guess, and I guessed the two most improbable people in the circle of our acquaintance." Now, Major Galbraith was an old admirer of Mrs. Betsey's youth, an ancient fossil remain of the distant period to which Miss Dorcas and Mrs. Betsey belonged.
He was an ancient bachelor, dwelling in an ancient house on Murray hill, and subsisting on the dry hay of former recollections. Once a year, on Christmas or New Year's, the old major caused himself to be brought carefully in a carriage to the door of the Vanderheyden house, creaked laboriously up the steps, pulled the rusty, jangling old bell, and was shown into the somber twilight of the front parlor, where he paid his respects to the ladies with the high-shouldered, elaborate stateliness and gallantry of a former period. The compliments which the major brought out on these occasions were of the most elaborate and well-considered kind, for he had an abundance of leisure to compose them, and very few ladies to let them off upon. They had, for the parties to whom they were addressed, all the value of those late roses and violets which one now and then finds in the garden, when the last black frosts have picked off the blooms of summer. The main difficulty of the interview always was the fact that the poor major was stone-deaf, and, in spite of both ladies screaming themselves hoarse, he carried away the most obviously erroneous impressions, to last him through the next year. Yet, in ages past, the major had been a man of high fashion, and he was, if one only could get at him, on many accounts better worth talking to than many modern beaux; but as age and time had locked him in a case and thrown away the key, the suggestion of tender relations between him and Mrs. Betsey was impossible enough to answer Miss Dorcas's purpose.
But Mrs. Betsey was bursting to begin on the contents of her news-bag, and so, out it came.
"Well now, Dorcas, if you won't go to being ridiculous, and talking about Major Galbraith, I'll tell you who it is. It's that dear, good Mr. Fellows that got Jack back again for us, and I'm sure I never feel as if I could do enough for him when I think of it, and besides that, he always is so polite and considerate, and talks with one so nicely and is so attentive, seems to think something of you, if you are an old woman, so that I'm glad with all my heart, for I think it's a splendid thing, and she's just the one for him, and do you know I've been thinking a great while that it was going to be? I have noticed signs, and have had my own thoughts, but I didn't let on. I despise people that are always prying and spying and expressing opinions before they know."
This lucid exposition might have proceeded at greater length, had not Miss Dorcas, whose curiosity was now fully roused, cut into the conversation with an air of judicial decision.
"Well now, after all, Betsey, will you have the goodness, since you began to tell the news, to tell it like a reasonable creature? Mr. Fellows is the happy man, you say. Now, who—is—the woman?"
"Oh, didn't I tell you? Why, what is the matter with me to-day? I thought I said Miss Alice Van Arsdel. Won't she make him a splendid wife? and I'm sure he'll make a good husband; he's so kind-hearted. Oh! you ought to have seen how kind he was to Jack that day he brought him back; and such a sight as Jack was, too—all dirt and grease! Why it took Dinah and me at least two hours to get him clean, and there are not many young gentlemen that would be so patient as he was. I never shall forget it of him."