them _en train_ for that pleasant consummation,
shall it not be held sufficient?

It would have been one of the pleasantest tasks of this narration to
marry Walter Lane Harding, merchant and good fellow, to Bell Crawford,
much more worthy to be his wife than when she was leaving the couch of
her sick brother, with the gallant Colonel of the Two Hundredth as her
attendant, in search of a peculiar shade of red ribbon. But Harding is a
man of mercantile regularity of idea, and not even a novelist can move
him more rapidly than _he_ chooses. He left Niagara on the Monday
following the departure of Bell Crawford and her brother on Saturday,
but business may have had more to do with his return to this city than
any outsider can know. He has since been very much in her society, and
friends believe that they are sincerely attached to each other. It is
highly probable that they will be at Kittatinny or the White Mountains
together, during the summer; and a marriage between them, which is one
of the eventual certainties, may take place at a moment when it is least
expected by others, but when they (the parties most deeply interested,
after all) happen to fancy that the time has come for such a culmination
of the pleasant acquaintance. Walter Harding, meanwhile, has forsaken
none of his old ways, and finds the same pleasure as of old, in the
street, in the country or at places of intellectual amusement, in the
company (when he can manage to light upon that ever-busy person) of his
friend and companion Tom Leslie.

* * * * *

It has already been said, in a previous chapter, that Tom Leslie and
John Crawford left the Cataract House within an hour after the discovery
of the abduction of Marion Hobart, taking carriage into Canada. Perhaps
neither of the two knew precisely what was his motive in the pursuit,
except the one before named--curiosity. If Crawford felt that he had a
duty to the young Virginian girl, and some claim upon her, under the
bequest of her dying grandfather, he was yet fully satisfied that she
had left with her own consent, and that she was now where he could take
no legal steps to reclaim her from any false position in which she might
have placed herself. Leslie had, and knew that he had, no right whatever
to meddle with the movements of the suspicious parties, except that he
might have obtained some description of Columbus' right by _discovery_.
However, the reasons being what th