"Fare thee well. Blessings attend thee, little one."
He sat there a long while, thinking how her mother had given up many worldly things for the man she loved. Primrose would do it, too, he said stoutly to himself, if she had loved. It was best this way. The sunshine did not rise up from the brown earth, but shone down out of the radiant blue sky.
Primrose Henry went home with a light heart. And that evening Allin Wharton had his answer.
Madam Wetherill shook her head, but said smilingly, "If you take the young woman you must take the old one, too. I will never give up Primrose."
The girl's soft arms were around her neck and the sweet young voice, with a rapture of emotion, cried, "Oh, madam, am I indeed so dear to you?"
The world goes on and the stories of life are repeated, but to each one comes that supreme taste of personal joy and rapture that is alone for itself; that is new, no matter how many times it may have been lived over.
There was a long, delightful engagement of the young people, who waited for Allin to take his degree, and his father felt justly proud of his standing. There was all the reckless happiness of two young people in that wonderful joyousness of youth when one apes sorrows for the sake of being comforted, indulges in dainty disagreements so that they can repent with fascinating sweetness, and are inconsequent, unreasonable, entrancing, and delightful, and gayety of any kind seems good, so that it goes hand and hand with love. Primrose danced and laughed through her April years, and then came May with bloom and more steadiness, and then peerless, magnificent June.
"I am but a sad trifler, after all," she would say to Madam Wetherill. "Shall I ever be like my dear mother or have any of the sober Henry blood in me?"
"Nay," was the answer. "We never find fault with the rose because it does not bear an ear of corn or a stalk of grain. And yet so great a thing as an oak tree is content to bear a small acorn."