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Page 5
"That's a compliment. I don't believe I like 'em from you. Don't make me
any more."
Perhaps she did not take the trouble to analyse the sentiment that
prompted her words. Had she done so, she would doubtless have found it in
a consciousness when in his presence of being surrounded with so fine and
delicate an atmosphere of unspoken devotion that words of flattery sounded
almost gross.
They paused before a gate. Pushing it open and passing within, she said,
"Good-night."
"One word more. I have a favour to ask," he said. "May I take you to the
picnic?"
"Why, I think no escort will be necessary," she replied; "we go in broad
daylight; and there are no bears or Indians at Hemlock Hollow."
"But your basket. You'll need somebody to carry your basket."
"Oh yes, to be sure, my basket," she exclaimed, with an ironical accent.
"It will weigh at least two pounds, and I couldn't possibly carry it
myself, of course. By all means come, and much obliged for your
thoughtfulness."
But as she turned to go in she gave him a glance which had just enough
sweetness in it to neutralize the irony of her words. In the treatment of
her lovers, Madeline always punctured the skin before applying a drop of
sweetness, and perhaps this accounted for the potent effect it had to
inflame the blood, compared with more profuse but superficial
applications of less sharp-tongued maidens.
Henry waited until the graceful figure had a moment revealed its charming
outline against the lamp-lit interior, as she half turned to close the
door. Love has occasional metaphysical turns, and it was an odd feeling
that came over him as he walked away, being nothing less than a rush of
thankfulness and self-congratulation that he was not Madeline. For, if he
had been she, he would have lost the ecstasy of loving her, of
worshipping her. Ah, how much she lost, how much all those lose, who,
fated to be the incarnations of beauty, goodness, and grace, are
precluded from being their own worshippers! Well, it was a consolation
that she didn't know it, that she actually thought that, with her little
coquetries and exactions, she was enjoying the chief usufruct of her
beauty. God make up to the haughty, wilful darling in some other way for
missing the passing sweetness of the thrall she held her lovers in!
When Burr reached home, he found his sister Laura standing at the gate in
a patch of moonlight.
"How pretty you look to-night!" he said, pinching her round cheek.
The young lady merely shrugged her shoulders, and replied dryly--
"So she let you go home with her."
"How do you know that?" he asked, laughing at her shrewd guess.
"Because you're so sweet, you goosey, of course."
But, in truth, any such mode of accounting for Henry's favourable comment
on her appearance was quite unnecessary. Laura, with her petite, plump
figure, sloe-black eyes, quick in moving, curly head, and dark, clear
cheeks, carnation-tinted, would have been thought by many quite as
charming a specimen of American girlhood as the stately pale brunette who
swayed her brother's affections.
"Come for a walk, chicken! It is much too pretty a night to go indoors,"
he said.
"Yes, and furnish ears for Madeline's praises, with a few more reflected
compliments for pay, perhaps," she replied, contemptuously. "Besides,"
she added, "I must go into the house and keep father company. I only came
out to cool off after baking the cake. You'd better come in too. These
moonlight nights always make him specially sad, you know."
The brother and sister had been left motherless not long before, and
Laura, in trying to fill her mother's place in the household, so far as
she might, was always looking out that her father should have as little
opportunity as possible to brood alone over his companionless condition.
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