“Is that all?”
“That is all.”
“God help me!” He lifted her gloved hand and touched it with his lips. No knight could have expressed in the act more respect, more hopeless tenderness. Then he turned silently away. Phyllis’s lips parted, but no words would come. She was full of sorrow for the noble, suffering, humble heart. She longed to say a kind word, and yet felt that it would be unkind; and she stood still watching him as he went farther and farther away. At a bend in the road he turned and saw her standing. The level rays of the sun set her in a clear amber light. He gazed at her steadily for a moment, raised his hand slowly, and passed forever from her sight.
There was something so pathetic and yet so lofty in the slight, vanishing figure, with the hand lifted heavenward, that she felt strangely affected, and could scarcely restrain her tears.
When people come to the end of a pleasure, so many little things show it. The first enthusiasms are gone, there is a little weariness in joy, the heart begins to turn to those fundamental affections and those homely ties which are the main reliance of life. It seemed to Phyllis that, for the first time, she was homesick. The low, white, rambling wooden house, spreading itself under moss-covered trees, began to grow very fair in her memory. The mocking-birds were calling her across the sea. She remembered the tangles of the yellow jasmine, the merry darkies chatting and singing and laughing, and her soul turned westward with an indescribable longing.
And she thought to herself, as she stood upon the terrace and looked over the fair land she was leaving with so little regret, “When the time comes for me to go to my heavenly home, I shall be just as willing to leave the earthly one.”
CHAPTER V.
“I loved you alway, I will not deny it; not for three months, and
not for a year; but I loved you from the first, when I was a child,
and my love shall not wither, till death shall end me.”—GAeLIC SONG.
“Our own acts are our attending angels, in whose light or shadow
we walk continually.”