“Well, fairy prince,” he said, lightly.
“Ah,” she replied, with pensive playfulness, “you recognize the fairy prince in me, then, do you? And that is the fairy prince I am to follow through all the world.”
She had approached him as she spoke, and while he looked at her with an inquiring face, seeking to fathom the riddle of her speech, she passed close by him, with a light waft of delicate perfume, and vanished into her chamber.
He stood for a moment, lost in a sense of some unravelled mystery lurking in her words and manner, and then suddenly turned and went down-stairs.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION.
Transformed again in lace and lilac from a fairy prince to a fairy princess, Muriel joined her friends in the library. Music and blithe talk filled up the hours till tea-time, and after tea they prepared to go to the Convention. Mrs. Eastman had declined accompanying them, and they set out together through the moonlit dusk, Harrington escorting Emily, and Wentworth Muriel.
“Why, how cold it has grown!” exclaimed Emily, surprised at the strange chillness of the air, as she and Harrington walked up the shadowy street.
“Yes, indeed,” replied Harrington, “and the wind has changed to the north, I verily believe. After this warm, delicious day, too! But no New Englander has a right to be surprised at the freaks of the climate.”
Engaged in conversation, they did not notice, as Wentworth and Muriel behind them did, when they were passing under the walled plateau, on which loomed in the dim moonlight the domed bulk of the State House, two young men who went by considerably intoxicated. The young men were Horatio and Thomas Atkins, who had been drinking juleps in honor of Southern institutions with Mr. Lafitte at the Tremont House, whither they had escorted him after dinner. Thomas had taken so many juleps that his hat was acock, his whiskerage fiercer than ever, and his gait a swaggering stagger, while Horatio was in that state of solemn and stubborn tipsiness in which a man is upon his honor to walk straight. Muriel sighed as she passed them, and all the way across the broad Common, its trees and sward dimly lighted by the moon, and chill in the fresher breath of the keen breeze, while she conversed with Wentworth, her thoughts rested with vague uneasiness on her uncle and his graceless sons. It was altogether the most unpleasant topic that ever entered her mind, and it was especially so on account of her mother. Mrs. Eastman felt her brother’s general course, particularly his political course, to be a family disgrace. All the old New England traditions, laws, and habitudes had been at least passively for liberty up to the insane year of 1850; and to have her kinsman one of the new brawlers for slavery and kidnapping was a sore reflection for the gentle lady. She had never recovered from the wound he had given her spirit, by enrolling himself as one of the Fifteen Hundred Scoundrels. And on this point, at least, Muriel felt as strongly as she did, particularly since the report had arrived that Sims had been scourged to death at Savannah.