Their conversation then turned upon Durward, and with the tact he so well knew how to employ, Mr. Graham drew from his blushing daughter a confession of the love she bore him.
“He is worthy of you,” said he, while ’Lena, without seeming to heed the remark, said, “I have not seen him yet, but I am expecting him every moment, for he was to visit me this morning.”
At this juncture Mrs. Aldergrass, who had been at one of her neighbors’, came in, appearing greatly surprised at the sight of the stranger, whom ’Lena quietly introduced as “her father,” while Mr. Graham colored painfully as Mrs. Aldergrass, curtsying very low, hoped Mr. Rivers was well!
“Let it go so,” whispered ’Lena, as she saw her father about to speak.
Mr. Graham complied, and then observing how anxiously his daughter’s eyes sought the doorway, whenever a footstep was heard, he asked Mrs. Aldergrass for Mr. Bellmont, saying they would like to see him, if he had returned.
Quickly going downstairs, Mrs. Aldergrass soon came back, announcing that “he’d paid his bill and gone off.”
“Gone!” said Mr. Graham. “There must be some mistake. I will go down and inquire.”
With his hand in his pocket grasping the purse containing the gold, Uncle Timothy told all he knew, adding, that “’twan’t noways likely but he’d come back agin, for he’d left things in his room to the vally of five or six dollars.”
Upon reflection, Mr. Graham concluded so, too, and returning to ’Lena, he sat by her all day, soothing her with assurances that Durward would surely come back, as there was no possible reason for his leaving them so abruptly. As the day wore away and the night came on he seemed less sure, while even Uncle Timothy began to fidget, and when in the evening a young pettifogger, who had recently hung out his shingle on Laurel Hill, came in, he asked him, in a low tone, “if, under the present governor, they hung folks on circumstantial evidence alone.”
“Unquestionably, for that is sometimes the best kind of evidence,” answered the sprig of the law, taking out some little ivory tablets and making a charge against Uncle Timothy for professional advice!