like a child, and almost as helpless.
"Jasper! Jasper! Why have you kept this from me?"

The answer of Eau-douce was not very intelligible, nor was the murmured
dialogue that followed remarkable for coherency. But the language of
affection is easily understood. The hour that succeeded passed like a
very few minutes of ordinary life, so far as a computation of time was
concerned; and when Mabel recollected herself, and bethought her of the
existence of others, her uncle was pacing the cutter's deck in great
impatience, and wondering why Jasper should be losing so much of a
favorable wind. Her first thought was of him, who was so likely to feel
the recent betrayal of her real emotions.

"Oh, Jasper," she exclaimed, like one suddenly self-convicted, "the
Pathfinder!"

Eau-douce fairly trembled, not with unmanly apprehension, but with the
painful conviction of the pang he had given his friend; and he looked in
all directions in the expectation of seeing his person. But Pathfinder
had withdrawn, with a tact and a delicacy that might have done credit to
the sensibility and breeding of a courtier. For several minutes the
two lovers sat, silently waiting his return, uncertain what propriety
required of them under circumstances so marked and so peculiar. At
length they beheld their friend advancing slowly towards them, with a
thoughtful and even pensive air.

"I now understand what you meant, Jasper, by speaking without a tongue
and hearing without an ear," he said when close enough to the tree to
be heard. "Yes, I understand it now, I do; and a very pleasant sort of
discourse it is, when one can hold it with Mabel Dunham. Ah's me! I told
the Sergeant I wasn't fit for her; that I was too old, too ignorant, and
too wild like; but he _would_ have it otherwise."

Jasper and Mabel sat, resembling Milton's picture of our first parents,
when the consciousness of sin first laid its leaden weight on their
souls. Neither spoke, neither even moved; though both at that moment
fancied they could part with their new-found happiness in order to
restore their friend to his peace of mind. Jasper was pale as death,
but, in Mabel, maiden modesty had caused the blood to mantle on her
cheeks, until their bloom was heightened to a richness that was scarcely
equalled in her hours of light-hearted buoyancy and joy. As the feeling
which, in her sex, always accompanies the security of love returned,
threw its softness and tenderness over her count