Mr. Horner's attempts to detain her, rushed into the house without
vouchsafing him a word of adieu, and left him standing, no bad
personification of Orpheus, after the last hopeless flitting of his
Eurydice.

"Won't you 'light, Master?" said Mr. Kingsbury.

"Yes--no--thank you--good evening," stammered poor Master Horner, so
stupefied that even Aunt Sally called him "a dummy."

The horse took the sleigh against the fence, going home, and threw out
the master, who scarcely recollected the accident; while to Ellen the
issue of this unfortunate drive was a sleepless night and so high a
fever in the morning that our village doctor was called to Mr.
Kingsbury's before breakfast.

Poor Master Horner's distress may hardly be imagined. Disappointed,
bewildered, cut to the quick, yet as much in love as ever, he could
only in bitter silence turn over in his thoughts the issue of his
cherished dream; now persuading himself that Ellen's denial was the
effect of a sudden bashfulness, now inveighing against the fickleness
of the sex, as all men do when they are angry with any one woman in
particular. But his exhibition must go on in spite of wretchedness;
and he went about mechanically, talking of curtains and candles, and
music, and attitudes, and pauses, and emphasis, looking like a
somnambulist whose "eyes are open but their sense is shut," and often
surprising those concerned by the utter unfitness of his answers.

It was almost evening when Mr. Kingsbury, having discovered, through
the intervention of the Doctor and Aunt Sally the cause of Ellen's