"I declare, you are quite like yourself," said her mother that evening.
The weeks went on. Miss Barry was making plans for her niece. She could not live here alone, even for a few months. And she longed to see her married. Though the others had almost forgotten how surely her days were numbered, she had not.
Fred assented delicately to her proposal.
"It is not as if there were only your income," she said with a touch of pride. "Sylvie will have enough to keep the old house as it is kept now, and your mother and sister have some claims on you. Still, for her sake"—
Sylvie would fain have put it off, but she was gently overruled. The wedding-garments were ordered, the day appointed. A quiet marriage in the pretty parlor, with only a few friends. They brought Miss Barry down stairs, and she listened while her darling reverently repeated her vows. They kissed the new bride while the tears were shining in her eyes, and sent her on a brief wedding-journey with heartfelt blessings. Maverick was to telegraph to them every day.
Fred Lawrence could hardly believe his happiness. They were like two children out on a pleasure-excursion, not needing to realize the gravity of life in these golden days. What cared they for pale winter suns and shivering blasts!
Long ago he had planned a brilliant tour to Europe for her. He had gone over it all, and would only have been bored; but it was the thing to do, and he might enjoy her fresh delight in it. But to both of them—to him especially—had come the higher revelations of life. It is the aggregation of individual characteristics that makes the sum-total of national character; and though at first retrenchment and economy seemed hideous words to the pleasure-loving, easy-going, self-indulgent souls nursed in the lap of prosperity, there was coming a realization to those who had fought their way valiantly across the yawning gulf, that the hot race for show, the desire to exceed one another, was not a lofty aim for an immortal soul, hardly for a cultured nature.
They both understood that beauty and grandeur were not far-off, hardly attained ideals, and that the great pleasures were set in the world rather as incentives and rewards, than highly seasoned daily food which must inevitably produce satiety. Some time, when they had earned this glorious vacation, they would take it hungering with the healthy appetite of a well-trained soul. At present the duty was to deny one's self firmly and contentedly, to round off the sharp corners, to shape the daily living to high, pure purposes; so that the greater excellences of Art should not despise the minor forms, the steps whereby true perfection was attained, the tangled threads that often required more real genius to comprehend than the one great moment of inspiration.
They came home again fresh and bright, with the peculiar fragrance of a new life about them, just as you shall smell spring in the woods on some mild, sunny February day. Fred fluctuated between office and city, quite a prophet of household art, welcomed warmly back to the old circles which had so quietly dropped him for a while. Is there not a great deal of this unconscious proving of the fine metal of souls in the world? We cry out as we are thrust aside, or given some hard task to do; we wonder people do not hold out kindly hands, smile with sympathetic eyes; and yet their very help might weaken us. When we have beaten our way across with the roar of the distant waves still in our ears, the shadows of the black, fierce, jagged cliff hardly faded, the taste of the brackish spray still lingering on our lips, an exultant thrill speeds through every nerve as we clasp a hand that has had to buffet through the same fateful current.
Early in April Miss Barry had another seizure, a fatal stroke this time. For a few days she lay in sweet content; and then dropped peacefully out of existence.