Kitabı oku: «Belford's Magazine, Volume II, No. 8, January, 1889», sayfa 9

THE PASSING OF THE YEAR

 
Like some triumphal Orient pageantry
 
 
 Beheld afar in slow and stately march,
Glittering with gold and crimson blazonry,
 
 
 Till lost at length through many a dusky arch —
I saw the day’s last clustering spears of light
 
 
 Enter the cloudy portals of the night.
 
 
The wind, whose brazen clarions had blown
 
 
 Imperious fanfarons before the sun
All the brief winter afternoon, died down,
 
 
 And in the hush of twilight, one by one,
Like maidens leaning from high balconies,
 
 
 The early stars looked forth with lustrous eyes.
 
 
Then came the moon like a deserted queen,
 
 
 In blanchèd weed and pensive loneliness;
Not as she rises in midsummer green,
 
 
 Hailed by a festal world in gala dress,
With thin sweet incense swung from buds and leaves,
 
 
 And strident minstrelsy of August eves;
 
 
But treading in cold calm the frozen plain,
 
 
 With bare white feet and argent torch aloft,
Unheralded through all her drear domain,
 
 
 Save where the cricket sang in sheltered croft,
And, faintly heard in fitful monotone,
 
 
 A solitary owl made shuddering moan.
 

Charles Lotin Hildreth.

THE LION’S SHARE

By Mrs. Clark Waring

CHAPTER I

SUKEY IN THE MEADOW

“Where’s that cow?”

The speaker was old Farmer Creecy. He was coming up the back steps, and his words were addressed to his wife, who was manipulating an archaic churn on the back porch.

“What cow?” sharply retorted Mrs. Creecy, startled out of all knowledge of four-footed beasts by the unexpectedness of the question.

“What cow! Look here, now, Alvirey, have you got any sense at all? How many cows have we got? Can’t you count that far? Don’t you know how many?”

Alvirey did. Looking like a sheep being led to the slaughter, and feeling worse than two sheep under such circumstances, she hung her head low, and answered, meekly:

“One cow.”

“Then I ask you, again, where is that cow?”

“And why do you ask me that, Jacob Creecy? You know as well as I do where she is. She’s down in the meadow.”

“And where’s Mell?”

“Down there, too. They ain’t nobody else to keep Sukey out the corn.”

“Ain’t, hey? Ha! ha! ha! That’s all you know about it! Where does you keep your senses, anyhow, Alvirey? Out o’ doors? Because, I ain’t never had the good luck to find any of ’em at home, yet, as often as I’ve called! This very minute there’s somebody else down in the meadow long side o’ Mell.”

“Why, who, Jacob? Who can it be?”

“You wouldn’t guess in a month o’ Sundays, Alvirey. Not you! Guessing to the point ain’t in your line. It’s that chap what’s staying over at the Guv’ner’s, who looks like he had the title-deeds of the American continent stuffed loose in his vest-pocket.”

“You don’t say so! Lor’! Jacob, what does he want down there with Mell?”

“What does he want? If you had a single grain of sense, Alvirey, you’d know without any telling. He wants to make a fool of her! That’s what a man generally has in view when he runs after a woman. But, I am a thinking, that chap won’t make no fool out of Mell, for Mell’s got a long head, like her old daddy, and a tongue of learning to back it! Just you keep on a saying nothing. You never missed getting things into a mess yet, as I knows on, ’cept when you let ’em alone. I’ll shut down on him right away, and then I’ll be blarsted if Mell can’t take care of herself! Don’t be nowise uneasy, Alvirey. Mell takes after her old dad.”

Alvirey did not return immediately to her churning. She craned her neck and got on her tiptoes, and gazed curiously after her husband as his stout figure rolled heavily to the edge of the breezy woodland, and thence beyond to the newly cleared grounds, and onward still to that narrow path among the pines, whose turf-margined and daisy-dotted track was a covert way to the meadow. Presently, through its mazy windings and the medium of a hazy summer atmosphere, Mr. Creecy came in sight of a youthful Jersey, sedately cropping some tender blades of grass on the enticing borderland of a promising cornfield, and a young girl not far away seated on an old stump in a shady nook under a clump of trees. Her costume consisted principally of an airy muslin frock, nebulous in figure, and falling about her in simple folds, and a white sun-bonnet, which was a bonnet and something more – to be explicit, an artistic elaboration of tucks and puffs and piled-on embroideries, beneath which peeped forth a face as prodigal of blooming sweets as a basket heaped with spring flowers.

At her feet lounged in careless fashion a young man. He was lithe and straight, and had that striking cast of countenance which catches the observant eye on first sight. This look of distinction, which in him was as marked in form as in feature, has been called, not inaptly, thoroughbredness. A self-made man never has it. All that a man may do will not put it upon himself, but his son possesses it as an heritage.

Looking upon such persons, we know intuitively that they have always had the best of everything, beginning from their cradle, the best of its kind.

Not always strong, these thoroughbred faces are generally attractive. The one before us possesses both strength and beauty. We may consider it foremost among his first-rate advantages.

Seeing this huge monster of humanity bearing down upon them, slow-wabbling, like a proboscidian mammal, fast-puffing, like a steam locomotive, the young man lifted himself to a sitting posture, and without any suspicion as to the true state of the case, remarked to his companion:

“Here comes a doughty old customer, upon my word! ‘What tempest, I trow, threw this whale with so many tons of oil’ – ”

The young lady cleared her throat – she cleared it point-blankly.

“Excuse me, but, perhaps you do not know, that is – is – my father.”

Stammering forth these words, she at the same time turned very red in the face.

This was slightly awkward, or would have been to another. As for this young man, he did not mind a little thing like that.

“I did not know it,” he told the girl, unruffled; “I crave your pardon. The fact is, it is an habitual failing of mine to make sport of fat people. The lubberly clumsiness of a huge corporation of human flesh is to me so irresistibly comic! My mother tells me a dreadful day of retribution is coming – a day, wherein I shall be fifty and fat, and a fit subject for the ridicule of others.”

“I cannot discern the foreshadows of such a day,” replied the girl, glancing with unconscious approbation at the admirable outlines of a figure whose proportions were well-nigh faultless. She fingered nervously at her bonnet-strings, smiled a panic-stricken little smile, broke out into a cold sweat of fearful expectation, and through all the horrors of the situation, tried her best to emulate the young man’s inimitable air of cultured composure. He got up at this juncture from the ground, not hastily, not awkwardly, but in his own time and at his own pleasure, and standing there, entirely at his ease, looked every inch the living exemplar of that expressive little phrase – “don’t-care.”

Some persons object to being interrupted, he did not.

The girl stood up, too, but stood with such a difference! More and more disconcerted she became with every passing second, so ashamed was she of her unsightly old father, in his blue cotton farm clothes, dirty and baggy, and his red cotton handkerchief – no redder than his face – so ashamed, and with such a sense of guilt in her shame! Truth to tell, the contrast between the two men thus confronted, was almost startling; the bloated ungainliness of the one, the sinewy shapeliness of the other; the misshapen grotesqueness of the one, and the sculpturesque comeliness of the other. It was a contrast painful to any intelligent observer, and for the poor girl before us, about to introduce a lover of such mold to a father of such aspect, it was like being put to the rack.

“Mr. Devonhough, father.”

“Mr. Who?” gasped a big voice, struggling out from smothered depths of grossness.

“Mr. Devonhough,” repeated the daughter, looking all manner of ways, “a friend of the Rutlands.”

“How does ye, Mr. Deviloh?” inquired the old farmer, in his exceedingly countrified, agonizingly familiar manner; extending a big, rough, red, and very filthy hand to be shaken by this exquisite sprig of refined gentility. Mr. Devonhough, needless to mention, touched it as gingerly as if it had been a glaringly wide awake and aggressively disposed Cobra de Capello. He endured the ceremony in silence, however; about as much as could be reasonably expected from one so superbly self-controlled.

“What will father do next?” wondered the perturbed young lady, in burning suspense. What he did was to stare unmercifully into the young man’s face, as if every separate feature was a distinct and incomprehensible phenomenon, and, afterward, inspect him with due carefulness, and at his very deliberate leisure, from the hat on his head to the shoes on his feet.

Mr. Devonhough did not flinch. Some persons object to being stared at; he did not. It is very foolish to mind such things. And besides, he had eyes as well as this old Brobdingnagian, and knew how to use them to quite as good a purpose. While the bellicose Creecy took in slowly the outward manifestations of this bland young stranger, the young stranger himself, in about two seconds and a half, had cross-examined every constituent element in the old man’s body, and thoroughly analyzed even the marrow in his bones.

We have intimated that the old man’s figure was bad; his face was a dreadful climax to a bad figure, so marred it was by worry, so battered by time, so travel-stained on life’s rough journey, so battle-scarred in life’s hard strife. Behind this forbidding frontage, the old man kept in store a good, sound heart; but what availed that to his present inquisitor? A good, sound heart in an ugly body, is the last thing a young man looks for in this world, or cares to find.

From the inspection of so much ugliness, Mr. Devonhough glanced towards the daughter; it was merely a glance, for with a delicate sense of feeling, he quickly looked away in an opposite direction. Flushed she was with shame, ill at ease, ready to cry out with a bitter cry, accusingly towards heaven, unspeakably humiliated; but, withal, a winsome lass, so fresh and fair, so pretty. Such a father! Such a girl! In heaven’s name how do such things come about?

Satisfied with his investigations, Mr. Creecy now remarked, quite cheerfully:

“I s’pose, sir, you air a drover?”

“A drover? No, sir; as far as I am able to judge, I am not. More, I cannot say, as I do not know what you mean.”

“Den I reckin, sir, you air er furiner inter the bargin.”

“No, sir; not a foreigner either, though I was educated abroad – partly.”

“Dat’s it,” ejaculated the old man, triumphantly. “Eddicashun is the thing what plays the Ole Harry wid the onderstan’in’. Dar is my little Mell, dar, when she war er chit of er gal, an’ knowed nuthin’ ’bout the things writ down in books, she war er mighty smart gal. She had a onderstan’in’ of plain English, mity near es good es mine, an’ she could keep house, an’ make butter, an’ look arter farm bizniss in gin’ral, not ter say nuthin’ ’bout sowin’ her own cloes; an’ now, bless God! arter gittin’ er fine eddicashun, she don’t know the diffrance ’tween er hoss an’ er mule, or er bull an’ er heifer; an’ she’d no mo’ let yer ketch ’er wid er broom in her han’, or er common word on her lips dan steal er chickin! Es fur es my experance goes, nuthin’ spiles er gal like high schoolin’. I purt myself ter a heap er trouble, young man, ter edicate my only darter, but I’d purt myself ter er long site mo’, ter onedicate ’er, ef I know’d how!”

This speech amused Mr. Devonhough to such an extent that he reluctantly displayed a set of very white teeth, and Mell’s rather strained gayety found an agreeable echo in his pleasant-sounding laughter. Even the old farmer’s features relaxed. He was “consid’ble hefted up” at the undisguised effect of his own facetiousness.

“The reason I axed ef yer wuz er cattle dealer,” he proceeded, “is dis. You ’pears ter be in the habit er comin’ hur every mornin’ ter see our fine Jersey. She’s er regular beauty, ain’t she?”

“She is – worth coming to see; but since you press the point, I feel called upon to disavow coming here for any such purpose.”

Here Mr. Devonhough turned his contemplative glance from the direction of Suke’s charms, and fixed it mischievously upon Mell who, having already, since the beginning of this interview, looked into the four quarters of the globe, now dropped her eyes in search of the mysteries beneath it.

“To be honest wid ye,” admitted old Creecy, “I didn’t ’low ye wuz arter Suke, ezzactly, but I sorter reckin’d ef yer’d come ter see Mell, it’s the front do’ yer’d er knockt at, es I ust ter do when I went er courtin’ my gal – Mell’s mammy – an’ had it out comferterble in the parler. We has er very nice home up dar on the hill, with er whole lot er fine furnisher in the front room, which Mell never rested ’till I went in debt ter buy. Now its mos’ paid fur, an’ I kinder ’low Mell ’ud be glad ter see yer mos’ enny time.”

“Thank you,” responded Mr. Devonhough, with frigidity.

“He mought go now, Mell, ef yer’d ax him.”

“Not to-day, thank you,” turning to Mell, with more graciousness of manner. “In fact, I have not yet breakfasted;” and he abruptly bowed adieu, and made his escape.

He was quite out of sight before father or daughter addressed a word to each other. At length the old farmer demanded roughly of the girl “What in the tarnation she wuz er blubberin’ erbout?”

“What, indeed!” sobbed Mell, in a frenzy of passion, and with eyes of storm. “I have good cause to cry. What else can I do? I can’t say Damn!”

“Can’t yer? Why not? ’Tain’t the cuss what’s so bad; it’s the feelin’. Ef the devil’s in yer, turn him out, I say. I ain’t no advercate er bad language, but ef er man feels like cussin’ all the time, he mought as well cuss! Dat’s my opinion. An’ ef it will help yer to cool down er bit, my darter, I’ll express them sentiments, which ain’t too bad for a young lady ter feel, but only to utter. So here goes – but remember, Lord! ’tain’t me, it’s Mell – damn! damn! damn! Sich er koncited, stiff-starched, buckram-backed, puppified popinjay, as this Mr. Devil – ”

“Hush your mouth,” screamed the daughter, beside herself with rage; “I don’t want him damned!”

“You don’t! Then who?”

Mell, wrought up to the highest pitch of exasperation, made no reply beyond looking daggers and gnashing her teeth.

“Not your old dad, Mell?”

“No, father; I don’t want you damned either. But what did you come down here for? What did you call him a cattle dealer for? What did you talk about such horrid, nasty, disgusting things, for? Oh! I am mortified almost to death.”

“I sorter reckon’d yer’d hate it worser’n pisen,” chuckled the old farmer; “but er good dose of pisen is jess what some folks needs bad. Come, come, Mell, hold your horses! It’s your eddicashun what’s er botherin’ of yer!”

“I wish to God I had no education!” exclaimed Mell, passionately. “It’s turned out to be the worst thing I ever did do, to get an education! It has made me unhappy ever since I came home and found things so different from what they ought to be. How poor and mean a home it is! How lowly its surroundings, how rude its ways and how I am degraded and fettered and hampered and looked down upon for things beyond my control!”

“I knows – I knows” – answered her old father, with that suspicious thrill-in-the-voice of a subjugated parent. “It’s yo’ ignerront ole daddy an’ yo’ hard-workin’ ole mammy what’s er hamperin’ ye! We ain’t got no loving little Mell, no longer, to say, Popsy and Mamsy, so cute, but only er fine young miss, who minces out ‘father’ and ‘mother’ so gran’, an’ can’t hardly abide us, the mammy what bare her, and the daddy what give her bein’. I knows. Ef it warnt fer us, ye’d be the ekill of the finess’ lady in the lan’, wouldn’t ye, Mell? Wall, ye kin be, my darter, in spite o’ us, ef you play yo’ kerds rite. You’se got es big er forshun es Miss Rutlan’ – bigger, I believe. Hern’s in her pockit, yourn’s in yo’ phiz. But, arter all, a gal’s purty face don’t ’mount ter mor’n one row er pins, ef she ain’t got no brains to hope it erlong. Play yo’ purty face, Mell; play her heavy, but back her strong wid gumshun! Then you’ll git ter be er gran’ lady o’ fashion, in spite o’ yer ugly ole dad an’ common ole mammy. Now, I wants ye ter tell me somethin’ ’bout dat young jackanapes. What’s his bizniss? What is he?”

“A perfect gentleman!”

“Sartingly – sartingly. I seed dat, as soon es I sot my eyes on ’im, but what sorter man? My ole dad ust ter say, ’one fust-rate man could knock inter blue blazes er whole cart load er gentlemin’. I’ll tell yer fer er fack, er gentlemin ain’t nothin’ nohow, but er man wid his dirty spots whitewasht. But what air the import er this one’s intentions respectin’ of ye?”

Whatever her ideas on this point, the girl was too modest to express them.

“Wall, maybe you kin tell me the dispersition of your own min’ regardin’ him?”

“Yes, I can do that,” she replied with alacrity. “Make up your mind to it. I’m going marry him just as soon as he asks me. And the sooner the better!”

“Exactly! But when is he gwine ter?”

“How do I know, father?”

“I kin tell ye, Mell. Never!”

“You don’t know one thing about it – not a thing!”

“Sartingly not! It’s the young uns these days what knows everything, an’ the ole ones what dont know nuthin’. But yo’ ole dad knows what he’s talkin’ ’bout. The likes o’ him will never marry any gal who puts herself on footin’ wid er cow. Does yer reckin Miss Rutlan’ would excep’ his visits in er cornfiel’, and let him make so free?”

“It only happened so, father.”

“Hump! It’s happen’d so er good many times, es I happen ter know. Happenin’ things don’t come roun’ so reg’ler, Mell. See hur, my gal, ’tain’t no use argufyin’ wid me on the subjec’. I ain’t got nary objecshun ergin yo’ marryin’ the young man; provided – now listen, Mell! —provided you kin git him. He’s es purty es er grayhoun’, an’ I reckin has es much intellergence, but insted ef lettin’ him make a fool er you, es he’s now tryin’ ter do, turn the tables, Mell. The biggest fool on top o’ this airth is the woman who wants ter git married; the next biggest fool is the man in er hurry ter git er wife! One mo’ word, Mell, an’ I’ll go my way, an’ you kin go yourn. Ain’t gwine ter mortify you no mo’. Remember, what I say: thar’s only one thing you dassent do wid er fine gentlemin —trus’ him! Don’t trus’ him, Mell; don’t trus’ him! My chile, the good Lord ain’t denied ye brains, use ’em! Here ends the chapter on Devilho – ”

Turning off abruptly, Mr. Creecy puffed sturdily up the hill, leaving his daughter deep in the sulks, but with much solid food for reflection.

Her eyes followed him sullenly. He was but one remove from – a darkey. Never had he appeared so irredeemably ugly, awkward and illiterate; never acted so altogether and exasperatingly vulgar, horrid and abominable, and yet she pondered deeply on his words. Their effect upon her surprised even herself. Can an unschooled man be wise? Ah, Mell! wisdom is not curbed by rhetoric, nor ruled by grammar. The respicere finem of the unlettered appears oftentimes to be jure divino.

After a while Mell wiped away the very last tear of agonized pride, which hung like a dewdrop on her long curling lashes. The gall and wormwood of her present feelings were somewhat abated. She knew what she was going to do.

“I’ll get out of this!” exclaimed Mell, speaking to herself in particular, and into space at large. “Get out of it, the very first chance.”

Get out of what, Mell? This humdrum life of little cares and big trials? this uncongenial association with an overworked and sickly old mother (once as pretty as yourself, Mell) and an ill-favored, ill-mannered and illiterate old father?

Is that what Mell intends to get out of?

Yes, and she means to do it in the easiest possible way, according to her own conception of the matter. Other girls may find it necessary to work their way, by a long and tedious process, out of disagreeable surroundings, but she will do it with one brilliant master-stroke —coûte qu’il coûte.

Put a placard on pretty Mell; proclaim her in the market place; hawk the news upon the street corners; inscribe it on the pages of the great Book up yonder!

To unite her destinies with some being – not divinely, blessing and being blessed – not vitally, loving and being loved; not necessarily a being affectionately responsive and, therefore, fitted to become the sharer of her joy and the assuager of her grief, but simply some being of masculine endowment serving in the capacity of a latch-key, through whose instrumentality she can gain admission into the higher worldly courts, for whose untasted delights her whole nature panted, is henceforth, until accomplished, the end and aim of Mellville Creecy’s existence.

Ho, there! all ye buyers, come this way!

Here’s a woman for sale!

CHAPTER II

A MOTE IN THE EYE

In Pompeii, eighteen hundred years ago, people – a good many people, were dreadfully afraid of dogs; so much so that many of the householders in that famous old city put Cave Canem on their front-door-sills, as a friendly piece of advice to all comers-in and goers-out. Just how their feelings were affected towards the domestic cow, we are left to conjecture; but now, after eighteen hundred years, and in less famous localities, people – a good many people – are still afraid of dogs, and without a nice sense of discernment in their fears, include cows, putting the two together as beasts that want “discourse of reason.”

Now, this is unrighteous judgment; for even a cow should be looked at fairly, even if she does show the cloven hoof. There are cows and cows, as well as men and men. Suke, the young Jersey, would not toss her horns at a butterfly, much less hurt a baby. She was sagacity itself, and granting she did not know the buttered side of bread, which is likely, she did know, to a moral certainty, where she got her grass and how.

Early the next morn, Suke began to low, and hoping to be heard by virtue of insistence, kept it up until nightfall, by which time she had bellowed herself hoarse. Suke could make nothing out of it, and no doubt dropped to sleep, theorizing on the perversity of remote contingencies, and wondering why it was that she had spent all the long hours of that breezy summer day in the lot, and the companion of her outings in the house.

The late afternoon found Mell in dainty attire, seated on the front porch, gazing wistfully in the direction of the Bigge House. He had not found her in the meadow in the morning, perhaps, he would seek for her in the little house on the hill, in the evening. It could not be that he had avoided paying her any attention that could be noticed by others; she had sometimes thought so, but then it could not be. She dismissed the idea; it was too uncomplimentary to herself, and too defamatory towards him.

But the slow hours dragged on; he came not. Mell sat alone. At ten o’clock she crept sadly into bed – into bed, but not into the profound slumber of youth and a mind at ease. Far into the night, her unquiet thoughts were yet heaving to and fro; advancing as restless billows of the sea, retreating as vaporous cloud-mists in the sky. Her snow-white bed – a feathered nest – erst so well suited to light-hearted repose, had changed its flexible lines of comfort into rigid lines of care.

Dropping to sleep at last, Mell dreamed she had made the world all over, from pole to pole, after a new model and on a modern plan, and having fitted it up expressly for her own needs, found it ever so much pleasanter, and a great improvement on the old.

It was upon the same old world, however, she opened her eyes the next morning, and into one of its most worrying days, holding, indeed, more than its share of disappointment and worry.

But when the third day was drawing to its weary close, and her longing heart longed still unsatisfied, existence had become a burden almost insupportable to poor Mell. For the third time she donned her prettiest dress. He must come to-day. Out again upon the little porch, with a book in her hand, and trying to read, Mell was oppressed with a sense of extreme isolation, a wasting famine of the heart, a parching thirst of the eye. In her despairing loneliness, incapable of any other occupation, she scanned eagerly every passer by; brooded deeply on many passing thoughts. This lonely waiting, in a small waste corner of the great wide universe, for a girl of Mell’s ambitious turn of mind, was, in truth, hard. It was lowest pauperism to her panting spirit – panting to achieve not little things but great. Humble strife in a little world, amid work-a-day environment, and among everyday people, had no charms for Mell. Such living was, in a word, unbearable.

And over there across that beauteous valley, in the enchanted halls of the unattainable, life was a delightful series of interesting events, redolent of delicate sentiments and sweet-smelling savors, spiced with novelty, brimful of pleasure, amusing, absorbing, far-reaching, all-embracing; in brief, a ceaseless symposium, purged of every ugly, common or narrow element, as roseate and as captivating to the fancy, as hand-painted satin framed in mosaic.

A boy walked up the garden path. The young lady seated on the porch, saw him coming, and a feeling of exultation shot through all the blood in her veins. The boy held a note in his hand, and Mell jumped into the contents of that note, intellectually, in less than the millionth part of a second. He could not stand it any longer; he was writing to know if he might call, and when. She had a great mind to let him come this very evening, though he did not deserve it; but then, do men ever deserve just what they get, good and bad, at women’s hands?

“A note, ma’am,” said the boy. Mell took it in silence, opened it tremulously, and read:

“Suke is unhappy. Me too. Don’t disappoint us to-morrow, and send me a bit of a line, sweet lassie, to say that you will not. J. P. D.”

“The scribblings of a school-boy,” muttered Mell, inconceivably dashed.

“No answer,” she told the boy. When the messenger was beyond reach of recall, she was sorry she had not replied to the note, or sent word, yes; for, perhaps, it would be better to see him once more, have a plain talk, and come to some understanding. The more she dwelt upon the matter, the more certain she became that this was her best course; so upon the morrow, the half-past five o’clock breakfast was hardly well over, when, with alternate hope and fear measuring swords within her, she fled to the lot for Suke. With one arm thrown affectionately around the Jersey’s neck, the two proceeded most amicably to the meadow. There she waited an hour nearly, before Jerome came; but he did come, eventually, wearing the loveliest of shooting-jackets, with an English primrose in his buttonhole, radiantly handsome, deliciously cool, and as much at his leisure as if it did not make much difference to him whether he ever reached his destination or not.

Thus Jerome – but what of Mell? Every medullary thread, every centripetal and centrifugal filament in her entire body was excited over his coming. She was flushed, and so hot and flurried, and had been waiting for him, it seemed to her, twelve months at least, and it enraged her now to see him sauntering so slowly toward her, just as if they had parted five minutes ago. Poor Mell, after her experiences of the past three days, was in that condition of body when a trifle presses upon one’s nervous forces with all the weight of a mountain. Irritated, she returned his good morning coldly.

“Dear me, Mr. Devonhough! Is it really you? Why did you come? I did not send you word I would be here.”

“No, you did not. Nevertheless, I knew you would.”

“Nevertheless, you knew nothing of the sort! How can you say that? I had a strong notion not to come.”

Jerome made a gesture of incredulity.

“Oh, a notion! I dare say. Girls live on notions, bonbons, sugar-plums, taffy, and what not; a pound of sweetened flattery to every half ounce of wholesome truth. But laying all notions aside, you will always come, Mellville, when I send for you.”

“How dare you,” began Mell, nettled to the quick and purposed to give him an emphatic piece of her mind, and then ignominiously breaking down, constrained, dismayed, crimsoning to the tips of her ears, paling to the curves of her lips, and wishing she had died before she left the farm-house that morning.

“And now I have offended you,” said Jerome drawing nearer, “and I did not mean to do that, pretty one! I cannot help teasing you, sometimes, because when you are teased your face has that innocent, grieved expression of a thwarted child, which I do so dearly love to see. And I must, perforce, do something in self-defence, you have been so cruel to me.” His tones were low, now, and as oily as a lubricating life-buoy. “I have waited for you one hour each day; I have gone away after every waiting, desolate and unhappy. Don’t you know, when two people think of each other as we do, when two people love each other as we do, that separation is the worst form of misery? Then why have you been so cruel, Mell?”

Peeping under the fluted archway of the white sun-bonnet for an answer, his face came in dangerous nearness to its wearer; their quickened breath united in a symphony of sweet sighs, their quickened pulses throbbed in a unison of reciprocal emotion.

One moment more, and – Mell stood off at some little distance, looking back roguishly at the figure kneeling alone beside the old stump, with outstretched arms tenderly embracing naught, and stealthy lips defrauded of their prey.

Mr. Devonhough did mind a losing game such as this. To be made to feel foolish and to look foolish, was more than he could tolerate under any conjuncture of circumstances. He extricated himself as speedily and as gracefully as possible.

“Miss Creecy!”

“Mr. Devonhough!”