Mr. Gardner quietly proposed himself to Mr. Dunbar as
Mary's suitor, and he had told him the connection would give _him_
great pleasure, they neither of them seemed to think much more was
necessary, for absolutely nothing was said to Mary till we got home.
Mr. Dunbar lived at Cambridge then, near Boston. He was a widower, and
Mary lived with him, and kept his house in some sort, and played with
his little boy occasionally. You may suppose she was not a very staid
personage, for she was at this time only seventeen years old, and as I
was more than twenty-seven, I occasionally checked her wildness, while
I could not help laughing at her graceful follies. She should have
been born of a French mother and a Spanish father, for she was gay and
volatile as the summer insect, and yet she had much depth of feeling,
and was full of romantic tenderness, with sometimes a haughty
expression that seemed altogether foreign to her usual character of
face, and looked only the index of what might be expected of her if
she should ever be exasperated to fight against her destiny. But so
far destiny seemed to wait humbly on her pleasure; she was beloved by
all, and though left early an orphan, had found in the indulgent
tenderness of her brother and his wife a delightful home.

"A little while after our return, Mr. Dunbar took an opportunity when
business did not press, for he went daily into Boston and left Mary
and me to ourselves through the day, just to mention the little matter
of Mr. Gardner's proposal to Mary; and to say he had accepted it so
far as he was concerned.

"Now, girls, you must not ask me about characters, I shall tell you
the facts, and you must guess at the characters of persons by them,
the _whys_ you can ascertain as well as I could tell you. When Mr.
Dunbar had told Mary, who received the intelligence in silence, he
dismissed the topic and no further allusion was made to it.

"I asked Mary soon after if she considered herself engaged to Mr.
Gardner.

"'Certainly not.'

"I asked her if she liked him, and she gave me the same laconic
answer. So I, too, dismissed the topic. There was a little mystery in
Mary's manner about this time. If she did not like Mr. Gardner she did
like young Randolph, a Southerner, and a student, who walked with her,
and sent her flowers, and notes, and all sorts of pretty and poetical
things to read--poems marked for her eye, and the sweetest and newest
music for her piano. Then of a moo