rendezvous; and Mrs. Harden, whose house stood on a breezy corner, was never obliged to complain at this season that her visitors went home too early. Darius Harden had been known unkindly to suggest that the wind-swept piazza and the matchless lemon sherbet were in some measure responsible for the difficulty with which his wife's adorers tore themselves away from her house on the hot summer evenings.
The ecstasy of iced drinks is only known by those Northerners who, like the Ruysdales, linger in New Orleans after the summer has fairly begun. The joy of the orange-flower and the pomegranate soda-water, as served by the black-eyed little Mercury at the drug-store on the corner of Rampart and Canal streets,—oh for the pen of Epicurus to write their praise in fitting phrase!
And yet that unreasonable man, General Stuart Ruysdale, was impatient to be away from New Orleans. Margaret thought it unnatural and unkind of him, and by a hundred feminine subterfuges and deceits, which six months ago she would have scorned to employ, had detained her father for several weeks after the day he had fixed for their departure. But there is an end to the patience of all men,—and the end, be it said, is usually very near to the beginning. The time came when General Ruysdale
