"Well, you draw conclusions pretty rapidly!" she said, turning her eyes upon him curiously. "I was going to excuse myself; and yet I should not be afraid to make a small woman's-wager that you err in at least half of your calculation?"
"As how?" asked the lawyer, somewhat surprised.
"Why, Mr. Townsend," answered Margaret Hayley (and what woman who held less true pride and less confidence in herself would ever have spoken so singularly, not to say boldly?) "it is at perhaps a rather early period in our acquaintance for me to return your candor with any thing that corresponds, and yet I feel disposed to waive the woman's right of reticence and do so. You think that I am already tired of your company and conversation, and that when you leave me I may go into pleasanter company. You are mistaken—I think you will not misunderstand me, any more than I did you a while ago, when I say that I quite reciprocate the interest and friendship you have expressed, and that I shall not go into more congenial associations when I leave you! There, will that do?"
Her eyes were smiling, but there was a tell-tale flush on either cheek, as she said this and extended those taper fingers, bending her proud neck the while, it must be confessed, a little as a queen might do when conferring knighthood upon one of her most favored nobles. Horace Townsend, in strict propriety, should have taken that offered hand in the tips of his own fingers, bowed over it, and let it fall gently back to its place. He was not playing strict propriety, as, indeed, the lady had not been for the past few minutes; and whether he took that chance before the surprised owner of the hand could draw it away, or whether there was very little surprise or offence in the matter, certain it is that though he did bow over the hand, he bowed too low—so low that his still warmer lips touched the warm fingers with a close, clinging pressure, and that the breath from those lips sent a tingle through every pulse of that strange girl, who was either dangerously frank or an arrant coquette.
That rape of the fingers perpetrated, Townsend turned away, too suddenly to notice whether his action had planted yet deeper roses on the lady's cheek. Margaret Hayley went back towards the piano, without another word, apparently to re-commence her suspended musical exercises, and the lawyer passed through the door leading into the hall. He did not do so, however, sufficiently soon to escape the notice of Captain Hector Coles, who, apparently on a voyage of discovery after the truant Margaret, strode into the parlor just as the other was leaving it, and as he nodded managed at the same time to stare into the lawyer's face in so supercilious and insulting a manner that he fairly entitled himself to what he did not receive—a mortal defiance or a blow on the spot! It was plain that he recognized Margaret Hayley at the piano, and that he saw she must have been alone with the object of his suspicion and hatred: was there not indeed some cause for the face of the gallant Captain assuming such an arrogant ferocity of aspect as might have played Gorgon's head to a whole rebel army? But the awkward meeting did not seem seriously to disturb the young lady: she looked up from her keys, saw the foes in the door-way, saw the glance they interchanged, and then dashed those bewitching fingers into a German waltz of such startling and impudent brilliancy that it seemed to accord almost premeditatedly with certain points in her own character.
Here, to Horace Townsend, the curtain of that morning shut down. He passed on and did not see the meeting between Captain Hector Coles, and "the lady" (more or less) "of his love," which may or may not have been cordial and agreeable to an extreme!
Another of those inevitable dashes, here. They are very useful, as they prevent the necessity of a steady and unbroken narration which would not be at all like real life—that thing most unsteady and most constantly broken into fragments.
The reader, who is perhaps by this time somewhat sated with White Mountain scenery (though, sooth to say, no gazer, however old a habitue, ever was so)—the reader is to be spared any further infliction, except as one remaining point of personal adventure may require the advantage of appropriate setting; and the mountains themselves are soon to fade away behind writer and reader, as they have faded away amid longing and lingering looks from the eyes of so many, losing their peaks one by one as they swept up Northward by rail from Gorham or rolled down Southward by coach through the long valley of the Pemigawasset to Plymouth. The thousand miscellaneous beauties of the White Mountain Notch, grander than those at the Franconia but far less easy of intelligent description—the magnificent long rides down the glen and over the bridges that span the leaping and tumbling rock-bedded little Saco—the Willey House with its recollections of a sad catastrophe and its one-hundred-and-fifty-eighth table being cut up and sold in little chips at a dime each, as "the one used by the unfortunate Willey Family,"—all these must wait the eye that is yet to see them for the first time, or linger unrecounted in the memories of those who have made them a loving study in the past. Personal adventure must hurry on, like the ever accelerating course of the goaded and maddened nation, and eliciting the same inquiry—whither?