"Saved? How saved?" asked Barbara, alarmed.
"But no," exclaimed Dinwiddie, starting up with a very tragic expression. "Perhaps it was but a transient pow—pow—power you exerted over him. Barbara, should you meet again, put forth all your attractions to—to—to bind him as with a sp—sp—spell to keep my fatal secret."
"What secret, father?"
"Hush—sh—sh!" said Dinwiddie, stepping on tiptoe to one door and then to another, and then looking with a cautious air under the sofa. He beckoned to his daughter. She drew near. Once more he looked anxiously around the room, and then whispered, in a hoarse, low tone, in her ear, these words, "You shall know all in due time."
Little Barbara drew a long breath, and resolved that it should not be her fault, if the Captain was not captivated. At that moment there was a ring at the door-bell; and Mrs. Dinwiddie came in from high conference with a select conclave of fashionable ladies, who yet clung with pathetic tenacity to the declining fortunes of Slavery and Secession.
III.
For a fortnight matters seemed to go on swimmingly. Dinwiddie had, as he thought, so managed as to bring the young people repeatedly together without his wife's having a suspicion of what was in the wind; and when Captain Penrose called on him at his counting-room and asked whether he might pay his addresses to Barbara, Dinwiddie whirled round on his office-stool, jumped down, and gave the young soldier a cordial hug.
"Certainly, my dear boy! Win her. She likes you. I like you. Everybody likes you. Go ahead."
"It is proper to inform you, Sir," said the Captain, "that my income is only twelve hundred a year; but"—
"Pshaw! What do I care for your income? There! Go and settle it with Barbara. You'll find her alone, I think. Mrs. Dinwiddie, for the last week, has been as busy as—as—we'll not say who—in a gale of wind. Remember, 'Fortune favors the brave.' I'm obliged to go to Philadelphia this afternoon. Good bye."