isitor was so much the calmer of the two,--and
exclaimed, and murmured, and sunk back, and sprung forward, and wiped
her forehead with her pocket-handkerchief! There were things she didn't
understand; that they should all have been so deceived, that they should
have thought Georgina was giving her lover up (they flattered themselves
she was discouraged, or had grown tired of him), when she was really
only making it impossible she should belong to any one else. And with
this, her inconsequence, her capriciousness, her absence of motive, the
way she contradicted herself, her apparent belief that she could hush up
such a situation forever! There was nothing shameful in having married
poor Mr. Benyon, even in a little church at Harlem, and being given away
by a paymaster. It was much more shameful to be in such a state without
being prepared to make the proper explanations. And she must have
seen very little of her husband; she must have given him up--so far
as meeting him went--almost as soon as she had taken him. Had not Mrs.
Gressie herself told Mrs. Portico (in the preceding October, it must
have been) that there now would be no need of sending Georgina away,
inasmuch as the affair with the little navy man--a project in every way
so unsuitable--had quite blown over?

"After our marriage I saw him less, I saw him a great deal less,"
Georgina explained; but her explanation only appeared to make the
mystery more dense.

"I don't see, in that case, what on earth you married him for!"

"We had to be more careful; I wished to appear to have given him up. Of
course we were really more intimate,--I saw him differently," Georgina
said, smiling.

"I should think so! I can't for the life of me see why you were n't
discovered."

"All I can say is we weren't No doubt it's remarkable. We managed very
well,--that is, I managed,--he did n't want to manage at all. And then,
father and mother are incredibly stupid!"

Mrs. Portico exhaled a comprehensive moan, feeling glad, on the whole,
that she had n't a daughter, while Georgina went on to furnish a few
more details. Raymond Benyon, in the summer, had been ordered from
Brooklyn to Charlestown, near Boston, where, as Mrs. Portico perhaps
knew, there was another navy-yard, in which there was a temporary press
of work, requiring more oversight He had remained there several months,
during which he had written to her urgently to come to him, and during
which, as well, he had received