Was there any story in the eyes that gave a glimpse of the great heart back of them? tender, sweet, brave eyes? Sometimes Primrose Wharton thought so, and all her pulses stood still in awesome silence. She was very happy. She and Allin had had an April fling and had settled into May bloom, but—could anything have been different—better? Not for her, but for him. A little sister! Is she that?
He was very happy, now, in a larger house, with a study and book shelves, his mother a tender and tranquil woman, Faith a contented housekeeper with a servant, and hardly knowing which to adore the most, Polly Henry's merry madcap household, or Primrose Wharton's sunny-haired daughter.
The only thing Philemon Henry would undo are those years that he was hardly answerable for.
"Of course it was not your fault," Polly declares in her impetuous, fond, and justifying way. "I think it really braver, for it requires more courage to own that a man has been wrong, than to go along in a straight path already made for him. And I fell in love with you as a redcoat, I really did, and fought with myself in the nights when I was alone. For, of course, I couldn't have told Prim; she would have crossed me quite out of her books. And I wouldn't have dared hint such a thing to anybody. Now, truly, was I not a silly girl?"
A fond kiss is her answer.
If the war made enemies it also made brothers, informed with larger wisdom.
A hundred and more years ago! Yet there are storied places that will never die out and the old bell of freedom has clanged many a peal, and the State House had many a Pilgrim. Truly there are numberless worthies in the great beyond, who have left behind imperishable memories even in a city that has grown anew more than once, and added beauty to beauty.