And so it turned out! Everybody laughed and chatted; Dorothea kissed Ellen Winthrop’s hand prettily, coquetted with Clive, and began to lay siege to the nurse’s heart, while she riveted the chains by which she held Marmaduke Hogg in bondage. She was in high spirits, but she was distinctly nervous, and whenever she introduced her fiancé to one of her fellow voyagers she showed a heightened color as she slid quickly over his surname.
Presently Clive withdrew a little distance to talk with the Governor’s secretary, and Dorothea caught the captain on his way from the ship and entangled him in a merry conversation with Miss Winthrop. This gave Marmaduke an opportunity to take me aside. I suspected that he wanted to confide in me that Mrs. Valentine had made one last determined refusal to receive him as a son-in-law, and that after the next few days of sea-voyaging we should meet an irate parent at the landing in New York and that there would be metaphorical “wigs on the green.”
I confess in that moment, as I envisaged the recalcitrant Dolly locked in her room and fed upon bread and water, that I wished Mr. Marmaduke Hogg had remained in Washington, which is the scene of so many battles that one more or less would not be obvious on the horizon. On the contrary, his first words were a surprise.
“Miss Clifford,” he said, “no one knows what Dolly and I owe to you!”
“But what have I done?” I inquired laughingly.
“Oh, a thousand things! Taken my part gently and kindly with Mrs. Valentine; and above all, allowed Dolly to come on this journey with you, when she was so utterly confused by her mother’s objections to our marriage that she did not know which way to turn.—It’s rather a big job for a girl to decide whether she’ll break her mother’s heart, or her lover’s!”
“Mrs. Valentine has no heart, save in the physiological sense,” I interrupted.
“Well, I have cut the Gordian knot,” continued Marmaduke. “I don’t want Dolly to know just at first, but I have set plans in motion for changing my name back to Forrest!”
“But you lose six thousand dollars a year!” I exclaimed.
“It doesn’t matter. I am offered a New York partnership when the war is over and it won’t be very long before I make it up.”