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Page 3
"Good-evening, Henry," said Mr. Lewis, pausing beside the young man. "Do
you know whether anything unpleasant has happened to George lately to
account for what he said to-night?"
"I do not, sir," replied Henry.
"I had a fancy that he might have been slighted by some one, or given the
cold shoulder. He is very sensitive."
"I don't think any one in the village would slight him," said Henry.
"I should have said so too," remarked the minister, reflectively. "Poor
boy, poor boy! He seems to feel very badly, and it is hard to know how to
cheer him."
"Yes, sir----that is--certainly," replied Henry incoherently, for
Madeline was now coming down the aisle.
In his own preoccupation not noticing the young man's, Mr. Lewis passed
out.
As she approached the door Madeline was talking animatedly with another
young lady.
"Good-evening," said Henry.
"Poor fellow!" continued Madeline to her companion, "he seemed quite
hopeless."
"Good-evening," repeated Henry.
Looking around, she appeared to observe him for the first time.
"Good-evening," she said.
"May I escort you home?" he asked, becoming slightly red in the face.
She looked at him for a moment as if she could scarcely believe her ears
that such an audacious proposal had been made to her. Then she said, with
a bewitching smile--
"I shall be much obliged."
As he drew her arm beneath his own the contact diffused an ecstatic
sensation of security through his stalwart but tremulous limbs. He had
got her, and his tribulations were forgotten. For a while they walked
silently along the dark streets, both too much impressed by the tragic
suggestions of poor Bayley's outbreak to drop at once into trivialities.
For it must be understood that Madeline's little touch of coquetry had
been merely instinctive, a sort of unconscious reflex action of the
feminine nervous system, quite consistent with very lugubrious
engrossments.
To Henry there was something strangely sweet in sharing with her for the
first time a mood of solemnity, seeing that their intercourse had always
before been in the vein of pleasantry and badinage common to the first
stages of courtships. This new experience appeared to dignify their
relation, and weave them together with a new strand. At length she said--
"Why didn't you go after poor George and cheer him up instead of going
home with me? Anybody could have done that."
"No doubt," replied Henry, seriously; "but, if I'd left anybody else to
do it, I should have needed cheering up as much as George does."
"Dear me," she exclaimed, as a little smile, not exactly of vexation,
curved her lips under cover of the darkness, "you take a most
unwarrantable liberty in being jealous of me. I never gave you nor
anybody else any right to be, and I won't have it!"
"Very well. It shall be just as you say," he replied. The sarcastic
humility of his tone made her laugh in spite of herself, and she
immediately changed the subject, demanding--
"Where is Laura to-night?"
"She's at home, making cake for the picnic," he said.
"The good girl! and I ought to be making some, too. I wonder if poor
George will be at the picnic?"
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