“Well,” he said, in a tone between dry and injured, —­ “I am going off to the West again, luckily; and I shall have no opportunity for the present to disturb you by making false pretences, of any sort.”

“Is opportunity all that you lack?” said Winthrop looking up, and with so simple an expression that Rufus quitted his walk and his look together.

“Why did you never make trial for yourself, Winthrop?” he said.  “You have a remarkably fine chance; and fine opening too, I should think.  You are evidently very well received down yonder.”

“I have a theory of my own too, on the subject,” said Winthrop, —­ “somewhat different from yours, but still enough to work by.”

“What’s that?”

“I have no mind to marry any woman who is unwilling to be obliged to me.”

Rufus looked at his brother and at the fireplace awhile in gravity.

“You are proud,” he said at length.

“I must have come to it by living so high in the world,” said Winthrop.

“So high?” —­ said Rufus.

“As near the sun as I can get.  I thought it was very near, some time in August last.”

Winthrop laid by his book; and the two young men stood several minutes, quite silent, on opposite sides of the hearth, with folded hands and meditative countenances; but the face of the one looked like the muddy waters of the Shatemuc tossed and tumbled under a fierce wind; the other’s was calm and steady as Wut-a-qut-o’s brow.

“So you won’t have any woman that you don’t oblige to marry you!” Rufus burst out.  “Ha, ha, ha! —­ ho, ho, ho! —­”

Winthrop’s mouth gave the slightest good-humoured token of understanding him, —­ it could not be called a smile.  Rufus had his laugh out, and cooled down into deeper gravity than before.

“Well!” —­ said he, —­ “I’ll go off to my fate, at the limitless wild of the West.  It seems a rough sort of fate.”

“Make your fate for yourself,” said Winthrop.

“You will,” said his brother.  “And it will be what you will, and that’s a fair one.  And you will oblige anybody you have a mind to.  And marry an heiress.”

“Don’t look much like it —­ things at present,” said Winthrop.  “I don’t see the way very clear.”

“As for me, I don’t know what ever I shall come to,” Rufus added.

“Come to bed at present,” said Winthrop.  “That is one step.”

“One step towards what?”

“Sleep in the first place; and after that, anything.”

“What a strange creature you are, Governor! and how doubtlessly and dauntlessly you pursue your way,” Rufus said sighing.

“Sighs never filled anybody’s sails yet,” said Winthrop.  “They are the very airs of a calm.”

“Calm!” said Rufus.

“A dead calm,” said his brother laughing.

“I wish I had your calm,” said Rufus.  And with that the evening ended.