At Last | Page 2

for the reputation for connubial felicity of those she had aided
to couple in the leash matrimonial, and more uncharitable toward
malicious meddlers or thoughtless triflers with the course of true love;
more implacable to match-breakers than to the most atrocious phases of
schism, heresy, and sedition in church or state, against which she had,
from her childhood, been taught to pray. The remotest allusion to a
divorce case threw her into a cold perspiration, and apologies for such
legal severance of the hallowed bond were commented upon as rank
and noxious blasphemy, to which no Christian or virtuous woman
should lend her ear for an instant. If she had ever entertained "opinions"
hinting at the allegorical nature of the Mosaic account of the Fall, her
theory would unquestionably have been that Satan's insidious whisper
to the First Mother prated of the beauties of feminine individuality, and
enlarged upon the feasibility of an elopement from Adam and a
separate maintenance upon the knowledge-giving, forbidden fruit.
Upon second marriages--supposing the otherwise indissoluble tie to
have been cut by Death--she was a trifle less severe, but it was
generally understood that she had grave doubts as to their
propriety--unless in exceptional cases.
"When there is a family of motherless children, and the father is
himself young, it seems hard to require him to live alone for the rest of
his life," she would allow candidly. "Not that I pretend to say that a
connection formed through prudential motives is a real marriage in the
sight of Heaven. Only that there is no human law against it. And the
odds are as eight to ten that an efficient hired housekeeper would
render his home more comfortable, and his children happier than would
a stepmother. As for a woman marrying twice"--her gentle tone and
eyes growing sternly decisive--"it is difficult for one to tolerate the idea.
That is, if she really loved her first husband. If not, she may plead this
as some excuse for making the venture--poor thing! But whether, even
then, she has the moral right to lessen some good girl's chances of
getting a husband by taking two for herself, has ever been and must
remain a mooted question in my mind."
Her conduct in this respect was thoroughly consistent with her avowed
principles. She was but thirty when her husdand died, after living
happily with her for ten years. Her only child had preceded him to the
grave four years before, and the attractive relict of Frederic Sutton,

comfortably jointured and without incumbrance of near relatives,
would have become a toast with gay bachelors and enterprising
widowers, but for the quiet propriety of her demeanor, and the
steadiness with which she insisted--for the most part, tacitly--upon her
right to be considered a married woman still.
"Once Frederic's wife--always his!" was the sole burden of her answer
to a proposal of marriage received when she was forty-five, and the
discomfited suitor filed it in his memory alongside of Caesar's
hackneyed war dispatch.
She had laid off crape and bombazine at the close of the first lustrum of
her widowhood as inconvenient and unwholesome wear, but never
assumed colored apparel. On the morning on which our story opens,
she took her seat at the breakfast-table in her nephew's house--of which
she was matron and supervisor-in-chief--clad in a white cambric
wrapper, belted with black; her collar fastened with a mourning-pin of
Frederic's hair, and a lace cap, trimmed with black ribbon, set above
her luxuriant tresses. She looked fresh and bright as the early
September day, with her sunny face and in her daintily-neat attire, as
she arranged cups and saucers for seven people upon the waiter before
her, instructing the butler, at the same time, to ring the bell again for
those she was to serve. She was very busy and happy at that date. The
neighborhood was gay, after the open-hearted, open-handed style of
hospitality that distinguished the brave old days of Virginia
plantation-life. A merry troup of maidens and cavaliers visited by
invitation one homestead after another, crowding bedrooms beyond the
capacity of any chambers of equal size to be found in the land,
excepting in a country house in the Old Dominion; surrounding
bountiful tables with smiling visages and restless tongues; dancing,
walking, driving, and singing away the long, warm days, that seemed
all too short to the soberest and plainest of the company; which sped by
like dream-hours to most of the number.
Winston Aylett, owner and tenant of the ancient mansion of
Ridgeley--the great house of a neighborhood where small houses and
men of narrow means were infrequent--had gone North about the first
of June, upon a tour of indefinite length, but which was certainly to
include Newport, the lakes, and Niagara, and was still absent. His aunt,