,
if we said that she had felt no distrust of the young man, in consequence of his
arrest, but we should also be doing injustice to her warmth of feelings and
generosity of disposition, if we did not add that this distrust was
insignificant and transient. As he now took his seat near her, his whole
countenance clouded with the uneasiness he felt concerning the situation of the
cutter, every thing like suspicion was banished from her mind, and she saw in
him only an injured man.
    »You let this affair weigh too heavily on your mind, Jasper,« she said
eagerly, or with that forgetfulness of self with which the youthful of her sex
are wont to betray their feelings, when a strong and generous interest has
obtained the ascendency - »no one, who knows you, can or does believe you
guilty. Pathfinder says he will pledge his life for you.«
    »Then you, Mabel,« returned the youth, his eyes flashing fire, »do not look
upon me, as the traitor that your father seems to believe me to be?«
    »My dear father is a soldier, and is obliged to act as one. My father's
daughter is not, and will think of you, as she ought to think of a man who has
done so much to serve her already.«
    »Mabel - I'm not used to talking with one like you - or, saying all I think
and feel with any. I never had a sister, and my mother died when I was a child,
so that I know little what your sex most likes to hear -«
    Mabel would have given the world to know what lay behind the teeming word,
at which Jasper hesitated, but the indefinable and controlling sense of womanly
diffidence, made her suppress her womanly curiosity. She waited in silence for
him to explain his own meaning.
    »I wish to say, Mabel,« the young man continued, after a pause which he
found sufficiently embarrassing - »that I am unused to the ways and opinions of
one like you, and that you must imagine all I would add.«
    Mabel had imagination enough to fancy any thing, but there are ideas and
feelings that her sex prefer to have expressed, before they yield them all their
own sympathies, and she had a vague consciousness that these of Jasper's might
properly be enumerated in the class. With a readiness that belonged to her sex,
therefore, she preferred changing the discourse to permitting it to proceed any
further, in a manner so awkward, and so unsatisfactory.
    »Tell