Chapter 17

His still refuted quirks he still repeats;
New-raised objections with new quibbles meets,
Till sinking in the quicksand he defends,
He dies disputing, and the contest ends.
COWPER.

As the soldier's wife was sick in her berth, Mabel Dunham was the
only person in the outer cabin when Jasper returned to it; for, by
an act of grace in the Sergeant, he had been permitted to resume
his proper place in this part of the vessel. We should be ascribing
too much simplicity of character to our heroine, 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
feeling 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, everything 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,"
said she 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 attained 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 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 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 anything, 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 might properly be enumerated in the class.
With a