At Last

At Last

The Project Gutenberg EBook of At Last, by Marion Harland
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Title: At Last
Author: Marion Harland
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5622] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on July 24, 2002]
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Language: English

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AT LAST.
A Novel.
BY
MARION HARLAND,
NEW YORK: 1870

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
DEWLESS ROSES

CHAPTER II.
AN EXCHANGE OF CONFIDENCES

CHAPTER III.
UNWHOLESOME VAPORS

CHAPTER IV.
"FOUNDED UPON A ROCK"

CHAPTER V.
CLEAN HANDS

CHAPTER VI.
CRAFT--OR DIPLOMACY?

CHAPTER VII.
WASSIL

CHAPTER VIII.
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

CHAPTER IX.
HE DEPARTETH IN DARKNESS

CHAPTER X.
ROSA

CHAPTER XI.
ON THE REBOUND

CHAPTER XII.
AUNT RACHEL WAXES UNCHARITABLE

CHAPTER XIII.
JULIUS LENNOX

CHAPTER XIV.
"BORN DEAD"

CHAPTER XV.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN

CHAPTER XVI.
THE HONEST HOUR

CHAPTER XVII.
AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS

CHAPTER XVIII.
THUNDER IN THE AIR

CHAPTER XIX.
NEMESIS

CHAPTER XX.
INDIAN SUMMER

AT LAST.

CHAPTER I.
DEWLESS ROSES.

Mrs. Rachel Sutton was a born match maker, and she had cultivated the
gift by diligent practice. As the sight of a tendrilled vine suggests the
need and fitness of a trellis, and a stray glove invariably brings to mind
the thought of its absent fellow, so every disengaged spinster of

marriageable age was an appeal--pathetic and sure--to the dear
woman's helpful sympathy, and her whole soul went out in compassion
over such "nice" and an appropriated bachelors as crossed her orbit,
like blind and dizzy comets.
Her propensity, and her conscientious indulgence of the same, were
proverbial among her acquaintances, but no one--not even prudish and
fearsome maidens of altogether uncertain age, and prudent mammas,
equally alive to expediency and decorum--had ever labelled her
"Dangerous," while with young people she was a universal favorite.
Although, with an eye single to her hobby, she regarded a man as an
uninteresting molecule of animated nature, unless circumstances
warranted her in recognizing in him the possible lover of some waiting
fair one, and it was notorious that she reprobated as worse than
useless--positively demoralizing, in fact--such friendships between
young persons of opposite sexes as held out no earnest of prospective
betrothal, she was confidante-general to half the girls in the county, and
a standing advisory committee of one upon all points relative to their
associations with the beaux of the region. The latter, on their side, paid
their court to the worthy and influential widow as punctiliously, if not
so heartily, as did their gentle friends. Not that the task was
disagreeable. At fifty years of age, Mrs. Button was plump and comely;
her fair curls unfaded, and still full and glossy; her blue eyes capable of
languishing into moist appreciation of a woful heart-history, or
sparkling rapturously at the news of a triumphant wooing; her little fat
hands were swift and graceful, and her complexion so infantine in its
clear white and pink as to lead many to believe and some--I need not
say of which gender--to practise clandestinely upon the story that she
had bathed her face in warm milk, night and morning, for forty years.
The more sagacious averred, however, that the secret of her continued
youth lay in her kindly, unwithered heart, in her loving thoughtfulness
for others' weal, and her avoidance, upon philosophical and religions
grounds, of whatever approximated the discontented retrospection
winch goes with the multitude by the name of self-examination.
Our bonnie widow had her foibles and vanities, but the first were
amiable, the latter superficial and harmless, usually rather pleasant than
objectionable. She was very proud, for instance, of her success in the
profession she had taken up, and which she pursued con amore; very

jealous