"O Ady, you don't mean it! you who are so good, so kind! Phil's heart will break."
"I don't think that," said Adèle, with a faint hard smile, in which her womanly vanity struggled with her resolution. "And whatever might have been, that which I have hinted at must not be now, dear Rose. You will know some day why—why it would be ungrateful in me to determine otherwise. Promise me, darling, that you will discourage any inclination toward it, wherever you can best do so. Promise me, dear Rose!"
"Do you really, truly mean it?" said the other, with a disappointment she but poorly concealed.
"With all my heart, I do," said Adèle.
And Rose promised, while she threw herself upon the neck of Adèle and said, "I am so sorry! It will be such a blow to poor Phil!"
After this, things went on very much in their old way. To the great relief of Adèle there was no explosive village demonstration of the news which had come home so cruelly to herself. The Doctor had given an admonition to the young minister, and the old Squire had told him, in a pointed and confidential way, that he had heard of his inquiries and assertions with respect to Mr. Maverick, and begged to hint that the relations between the father and the mother of Adèle were not of the happiest, and it was quite possible that Mr. Maverick had assumed latterly the name of a bachelor; it was not, however, a very profitable subject of the speculation or of gossip, and if he valued the favor of the young ladies he would forbear all allusion to it. A suggestion which Mr. Catesby was not slow to accept religiously, and scrupulously to bear in mind.
Phil was as hot a lover as ever, though for a time a little more distant: and the poor fellow remarked a new timidity and reserve about Adèle, which, so far from abating, only fed the flame; and there is no knowing to what reach it might have blazed out, if a trifling little circumstance had not paralyzed his zeal.
From time to time, Phil had been used to bring home a rare flower or two as a gift for Adèle, which Rose had always lovingly arranged in some coquettish fashion, either upon the bosom or in the hair of Adèle; but a new and late gift of this kind—a little tuft of the trailing arbutus which he has clambered over miles of woodland to secure—is not worn by Adèle, but by Rose, who glances into the astounded face of Phil with a pretty, demure look of penitence.
"I say, Rose," says he, seizing his chance for a private word,—"that's not for you."
"I know it, Phil; Adèle gave it to me."