“Thou perfect flower! To express the fullness of my heart would be impossible,” he joyfully exclaimed.
And thus, while pressing her hand on his shoulder and feeling a ring on her finger, he gently removed it.
“Oh! that’s Virginia’s ring; that is, I got it from her,” she protested feebly, her head pillowed on his breast.
“It shall be a ‘Mizpah’ of trust, dearest, and shall come back to you with an engagement ring,” he softly replied, as he slipped it into his vest pocket.
In one of Virginia’s happy girlish moments, she had picked up the ring from Constance’s dressing table, and admiring its beauty, smilingly slipped it upon her own finger, with the owner’s permission to wear it awhile, but with the injunction to “be careful not to lose it, dear, for I value it very highly. It was John’s gift to me before we were married”—and then later, on that same day, with Hazel’s arm clasping her waist and her own arm clasping Hazel’s, the two happy girls strolling through the grounds—to have Hazel remove it in the same admiring fashion and slip it on her own finger, Virginia yielding to her young cousin, just as Constance, in perfect trust, yielded to her. And then in the morning, all forgetful of the ring, she left for the Valley farm.
And now, on her sudden return, she beheld that same ring taken by Corway as a size for Hazel’s engagement ring, and heard him declare “it shall be a Mizpah of trust, dearest.”
A sigh unconsciously escaped her; a sigh freighted with the blood of fibers as love tore itself away from her heart.
Hazel heard it, and in alarm said to Corway: “What is that? Did you hear it? So like a moan?”
He looked around. “You were mistaken, dearest; there is none here but you and me.”
“Oh, yes, I heard it”—and with a timidity in which a slight sense of fear was discernible, said: “Let us go out in the open.”