ies disputing, and the contest ends.
COWPER.

As the soldier's wife was sick in her berth, Mabel Dunham was the only
person in the outer cabin when Jasper returned to it; for, by an act of
grace in the Sergeant, he had been permitted to resume his proper place
in this part of the vessel. We should be ascribing too much simplicity
of character to our heroine, if we said that she had felt no distrust of
the young man in consequence of his arrest; but we should also be doing
injustice to her warmth of feeling and generosity of disposition, if we
did not add, that this distrust was insignificant and transient. As
he now took his seat near her, his whole countenance clouded with the
uneasiness he felt concerning the situation of the cutter, everything
like suspicion was banished from her mind, and she saw in him only an
injured man.

"You let this affair weigh too heavily on your mind, Jasper," said she
eagerly, or with that forgetfulness of self with which the youthful of
her sex are wont to betray their feelings when a strong and generous
interest has attained the ascendency; "no one who knows you can, or
does, believe you guilty. Pathfinder says he will pledge his life for
you."

"Then you, Mabel," returned the youth, his eyes flashing fire, "do not
look upon me as the traitor your father seems to believe me to be?"

"My dear father is a soldier, and is obliged to act as one. My father's
daughter is not, and will think of you as she ought to think of a man
who has done so much to serve her already."

"Mabel, I'm not used to talking with one like you, or saying all I think
and feel with any. I never had a sister, and my mother died when I was a
child, so that I know little what your sex most likes to hear--"

Mabel would have given the world to know what lay behind the teeming
word at which Jasper hesitated; but the indefinable and controlling
sense of womanly diffidence made her suppress her curiosity. She waited
in silence for him to explain his own meaning.

"I wish to say, Mabel," the young man continued, after a pause which
he found sufficiently embarrassing, "that I am unused to the ways and
opinions of one like you, and that you must imagine all I would add."

Mabel had imagination enough to fancy anything, but there are ideas and
feelings that her sex prefer to have expressed before they yield them
all their own sympathies, and she had a vague consciousness that these
of Jasper might properly be enu