"Do not say it will not be," said Lucy, "or I shall punish you some how or other. Now, would you not be glad to have us down here, Colonel Hargrave and all; think what nice parties there would be; and who knows what nice beau might come down and take you away with him."
Mabel's cheek blushed scarlet, and her lips curled in preparation for some angry retort—suddenly she checked herself as she remembered the conversation of the preceding night. Have I then failed so soon, thought she to herself.
"Ah, mamma, you know my vain wicked heart better than I do—for the first observation that seems to point me out as single, and needing a lover, makes me angry."
"Ah, you blush, Mabel," pursued her heedless tormentor, too unaccustomed to feel for others, to be able to read her countenance, or tell why her words had given pain; "perhaps, you are engaged to some one, under the rose, all the while."
Mabel was silent for a moment; it required that moment to seize the reins with which she usually held her temper in check, and then she replied, gently, but gravely.
"I am not engaged to any one; you mistake my face entirely, but I colored because I was silly enough to feel angry at your thinking I was wishing to be married—but it was wrong of me, because you could not understand my feelings without being told. So I must tell you," she continued smiling, "that I am a determined old maid; though, perhaps, you may think such a resolution needless in a place where gentlemen seldom come to disturb our equanimity."
"What, wedded to your duties, are you? Or what other queer reason may have led you to such a determination," enquired Lucy, who could not help feeling that her new friend's speech meant more than it usually does in the mouth of a beautiful girl; and she was surprised to think she should wish to retire from the field of conquest, before actually driven from it by dulness or age. Her own vanity could not conceal from her, a certain indescribable something which rendered her cousin particularly attractive, and, though she certainly ranked her second to herself, that did not imply any very low degree of merit.
Mabel's composure, which was seldom lost, was now entirely restored, and she answered Lucy's wondering eyes with one of her peculiarly sweet and gentle smiles.
"You may well wonder," said she, "that I, who seem so little your senior, should already have made such a resolution. I too, who am fond of society, fond of companionship, and all that is domestic, and choose solitude only as wholesome medicine; but some destinies are fixed early, others late; and I, who once thought, and still think, marriage, with its social harmony and sweet feelings of dependence, most fitted for a woman's nature, have yet quite made up my mind to remain single."