"Yes, that was what you called me last night! Excuse me, gentlemen, for interrupting a very pretty little story, but I am going away and the Captain will no doubt continue it."
He did go away, walking down towards the house, a little flushed in face but otherwise as composed as possible. Captain Hector Coles did not tell out his story, for some reason or other; and the moment after he too went away.
"What the deuce is it all about?" asked one of the gentlemen when they had both departed.
"Haven't the least idea," said another. "Though, by the way, the Captain has a very pretty woman with him—I wonder if there should not be a lady at the bottom of the trouble, as usual?"
"Seemed to be some truth in that story about getting giddy in the head, by the way it hit!" said a third.
"Don't look much like cowards, either of them," said a fourth. "And, now that I think of it—wasn't that the name—Townsend—of the fellow who leaped into the Pool the other day over at the Profile?"
"Don't know—shouldn't wonder—well, let them fight it out as they please—none of our business, I suppose!" rejoined one of the others; and the party dispersed in their several directions.
Such was the scene in the billiard room; and it was not strange that more than a day after, no report of it had come to the ears of Margaret Hayley or her mother, through the medium of any of the bye-standers; for the persons most nearly interested are not those who first hear such revelations of gossip. That neither the Captain nor Horace Townsend should personally have spoken of it to Margaret is quite as natural, for reasons easily appreciated. That young lady, with two lovers more or less declared, was accordingly very much in the dark as to the peculiarly volcanic character of her admirers and the chances that at some early day they might fall to and finish each other up on the Kilkenny-cat principle, leaving her with none!
The third day after the ascent of Washington by our party witnessed its disruption in some important particulars. The morning stage down the Notch took away the Vanderlyns, on their way to Lake Winnipiseogee and thence to Newport. They had been in the mountains little more than a week, but seen most of the points of interest at the Franconia and White Notches; and other engagements, previously formed, were hurrying them forward, as humanity in the New World is always hurried, whether engaged in a pleasure tour or a life labor. They left a vacancy behind them, and foretold the gradual flight of all those summer birds who had made the mountains musical, and the coming of those long and desolate winter months when the rooms then so alive with life and gayety should all be bare and empty, the snow lying piled in valley and on mountain peak so deeply that no foot of man might venture to tread them, and the wild northern blast wailing through the gorges and around the deserted dwellings as if sounding a requiem for the life and love and hope fled away.