"The prospect looks somewhat dubious, does n’t it? But if Mr. Clavering loves me, he can wait."
"But," said I, "your uncle is only little past the prime of life and appears to be in robust health; it will be years of waiting, Mary."
"I don’t know," she muttered, "I think not. Uncle is not as strong as he looks and—" She did not say any more, horrified perhaps at the turn the conversation was taking. But there was an expression on her countenance that set me thinking at the time, and has kept me thinking ever since.
Not that any actual dread of such an occurrence as has since happened came to oppress my solitude during the long months which now intervened. I was as yet too much under the spell of her charm to allow anything calculated to throw a shadow over her image to remain long in my thoughts. But when, some time in the fall, a letter came to me personally from Mr. Clavering, filled with a vivid appeal to tell him something of the woman who, in spite of her vows, doomed him to a suspense so cruel, and when, on the evening of the same day, a friend of mine who had just returned from New York spoke of meeting Mary Leavenworth at some gathering, surrounded by manifest admirers, I began to realize the alarming features of the affair, and, sitting down, I wrote her a letter. Not in the strain in which I had been accustomed to talk to her,—I had not her pleading eyes and trembling, caressing hands ever before me to beguile my judgment from its proper exercise,—but honestly and earnestly, telling her how Mr. Clavering felt, and what a risk she ran in keeping so ardent a lover from his rights. The reply she sent rather startled me.
"I have put Mr. Robbins out of my calculations for
