ant as the magnet to its poles.

It was still the steps of Eloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he
brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago
they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow,
he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery
shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes;
to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose
essence told all his philosophy:--"The great error in government," he
said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government,
individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this
error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."

Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening,
as Marlboro' thus harangued Eloise.

"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all
oppose."

"Nullification is a good solvent."

"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the
horizon, man!"

"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"

"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr.
St. George, bowing to Eloise; "and as to the last,--I'll none of it!"

And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Eloise was about to
ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly
taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.

"What has that _contrabandista_ been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St.
George.

Eloise looked ignorantly up.

"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says,
when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that
we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let
us make the best of it!"

"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the
disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"

"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring
the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I
have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed
under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.

Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Eloise to take a
vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily
and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long
morning with her in the cabinet, either