So then he showed impatience, and then she, reading him by herself, suspected some vulgar rival.
Suspicion soon bred jealousy, jealousy vigilance, and vigilance detection.
Her first discovery was that, so long as she talked of Miss Helen Rolleston, she was always welcome; her second was, that Seaton slept in the tool-house.
She was not romantic enough to connect her two discoveries together.

They lay apart in her mind, until circumstances we are about to relate supplied a connecting link.
One Thursday evening James Seaton's goddess sat alone with her papa, and--being a young lady of fair abilities, who had gone through her course of music and other studies, taught brainlessly, and who was now going through a course of monotonous pleasures, and had not accumulated any great store of mental resources--she was listless and languid, and would have yawned forty times in her papa's face, only she was too well-bred.

She always turned her head away, when it came, and either suppressed it, or else hid it with a lovely white hand.

At last, as she was a good girl, she blushed at her behavior, and roused herself up, and said she, "Papa, shall I play you the new quadrilles ?" Papa gave a start and a shake, and said, with well-feigned vehemence, "Ay, do, my dear," and so composed himself--to listen; and Helen sat down and played the quadrilles.
The composer had taken immortal melodies, some gay, some sad, and had robbed them of their distinctive character and hashed them till they were all one monotonous rattle.

But General Rolleston was little the worse for all this.