"Very possible, my dear!" said Joe. "I'll warrant such things have been done, and my gentleman looks just mischievous enough. But no—he would not dare do such a thing, for he could see with half an eye that if he did I should one day pay him for it!"
"If you ever had a chance!" remarked Bell with some approach to a sneer.
"Oh," said Joe. "Trust me for that! Didn't I just tell you that I had half made up my mind to take him? and if I should, you know, I should have plenty of time to bring him into the proper subjection."
"How do you know but he may be married?" asked Bell, who had a little more forethought than Miss Joe in certain directions.
"Humph!" said Joe, "that would be awkward, especially as I am not quite ready, yet, for an elopement and the subsequent flattering paragraphs in the papers, about 'the beautiful and accomplished Miss J.H.' having left for Europe on the last steamer from Boston, in company with 'the popular journalist but sad Lothario, Mr. T.L., who has left an interesting wife and two children to deplore the departure of the husband and father from the paths of rectitude.'"
"Well, you are incorrigible!" laughed Miss Crawford, fairly carried away by the irresistible current of the wild girl's humor. "How can you talk so flippantly of things so deplorable?"
"I scarcely know, myself!" was the answer. "But there is really a dash of romance about such things, which almost makes them endurable. Poor Mrs. Brannan made a mess of it, to be sure, coming out at last with a ruined character and the widow of a man several ranks lower in the army than the husband from whom she had run away; but was there not something chivalrous in Wyman coming back at once at the breaking out of the war, and sending an offer to the man he had injured, to afford him any satisfaction he might think proper to demand?"
"And was there not something sublimely cutting," asked Bell, "in the reply of General Brannan that he demanded no satisfaction whatever, as Colonel Wyman had only relieved him of a woman unworthy of his love or confidence?"
"Yes, that was a little lowering to the dignity of the woman, if she had any left," said Joe. "But the Kearney elopement—was not that romantic without any drawback? There was something of the wicked old Paladin, that rattle-heads like myself cannot help admiring, in the one-armed man whose other limb slept in an honored grave in Mexico, invading the charmed circle of New York moneyed-respectability, carrying off the daughter of one of its first lawyers and an ex-Collector—then submitting to a divorce, marrying the woman who had trusted all to his honor, and plunging into the fights of Magenta and Solferino with the same spirit which had led him into the thick of the conflicts at Chapultepec and the Garita de Belen. Poor Wyman has already expiated his errors with his life, but I do hope that Kearney may carry his remaining arm through this miserable war and live to be so honored that even his one great fault may be forgotten!"
The young girl's eyes flashed, her cheeks were flushed, and any one who looked upon her at that moment would have believed her almost brave enough for an Amazon and more than a little warped in her perceptions of what constituted the right and the wrong of domestic relations. How little, meanwhile, they would have known her! Ninety-nine out of one hundred of the women unwilling to confess that they had ever read a page of the Wyman or the Kearney scandal, and saying "hush!" and "tut! tut!" to any one who pretended to make the least defence of either—would have been found infinitely more approachable for any purpose of actual wrong or vice, than rattling, out-spoken and irrepressible Joe Harris!