Nan shook her head. They did not take her seriously. They did not know that this was the love of her life, that it would be impossible for her to change. She waited for the next words which came from her aunt. “And yet, no doubt the dear thing imagines her affections are securely placed, the poor darling.”
“I wish we had looked ahead a little; we might have prevented this.” It was Mrs. Comer who spoke.
“How could we? It would have seemed unreasonable to say to the young man, ‘We can’t have you coming here because we are afraid one of our girls will fall in love with you.’ Suppose, too, he had been honestly attracted to her, what then?”
“Oh, we couldn’t have permitted anything so serious as that. He is not the kind of man for Nan.” Mrs. Corner was confident.
“There’s no one good enough for Nan, if it comes to that,” was the reply.
“Well, Helen, we must not worry. I hope there is no great harm done. She will probably never see our artist again. If he is to marry she is not likely to, and thus an end to that. Ah, my dear, I wish I could keep them all children. I begin to tremble for my darling girls as I see them facing womanhood.” Mrs. Corner gave the final word.
Then Nan heard the chairs moved back and there was nothing more heard. Her brain was in a whirl. The mists of imagination were beginning to part to show realities. She wondered if her Aunt Helen still thought of the organist, and if that was the reason she had never married, but no, she remembered a little photograph of a young man in Confederate gray, which she had once come across in looking through a box of old letters her mother had, and she had asked, “Who is this, mother?” “The young man who would have been your Aunt Helen’s husband, if he had lived,” her mother had told her. “He was killed at Gettysburg.” Nan had thought at the time this was probably why her aunt’s hair had turned gray so early. “No wonder,” she sighed as she fastened her belt around her slender waist.
She slipped out at the back of the tent and walked slowly through the woods, turning over in her mind the conversation she had just listened to. “If a man were married of course it would be a dreadful thing for a girl to continue to think of him.” She mustn’t do that, and why should she—if he didn’t care for her? He was not Lohengrin, nor she Elsa. He was not Siegfried nor she Brunhilde; that was all as unreal as the characters themselves. Plain matter-of-fact truth was that Marcus Wells had been entertained in playing with her as two children play. It had meant nothing whatever to him but pastime. He was in love with another girl and they were to be married. She quite understood his fanciful way of speaking of his analysis of her; “he wouldn’t tear the pretty flower of her heart to pieces just to classify it”; so she was nothing more than a specimen to be stuck through with a pin and pinned to the wall of his experience. She gave a little gasp. She could not, and would not meet him again.
Dr. Paul made his farewells that evening to a very quiet, thoughtful Nan. “I shall see you at Christmas, I hope,” he said. “You expect to be at home for the holidays, your mother says.”
“Yes, we shall go to Aunt Sarah,” she answered without enthusiasm.