Phemie Frost's Experiences

by Ann S. Stephens

At twelve o'clock that day the stranger ventured to ask a favor. Would the widow give him a little music?

The widow said she would. The sweetness of a whole boiling of maple sugar was in her smile as she sat down by the parlor piano, and sent her two little hands fluttering over it like a pair of white pigeons with love-letters under their wings.

The widow flew her fingers; the widow looked at the stranger from under her eyelashes, and her voice thrilled through him till he began to think of magnolias and mocking-birds and other ornamental things which soften a man's feelings down to the fluffiness of a feather bed.

When she had done singing, he asked her to walk with him on the beach. She gave another slow lift of her eyelashes, said she would, and ran upstairs after the Leghorn and the Japanese umbrella, brown and yellow, with as many bones in it as the first April shad.

They walked the beach up and down, she leaning heavier and heavier on his arm at each turn. Then they sat down on the sand with their faces to the sea, and held the umbrella so as to shade off the people on the bank—they didn't care for the sun a bit—and in that condition they sat and talked and talked and talked.

By and by he got up from the sand. She lifted her eyes with a pitiful look of helplessness. He reached out his hand, and she rose to it gracefully, like a trout to a fly. The hand clung to his more than a minute after she got up—the sand was so uneven, you see. The stranger bore this with Christian fortitude, and really seemed as if he rather liked it. In fact, he encouraged her to hold on; and she did, with her sweet widowed face lifted to his just long enough to set his heart off like a windmill, when she dropped it again.

When they came up the flight of wooden steps that leads down from the bank, both her white hands were clasped over his arm as loving as the soft paws of a kitten, and he looked like a fellow that had been out shooting doves, and had come in with his net full.

They went in to lunch, and ate spring chickens; then they ended off with silly-bubs, which is a sweet froth that melts to nothing on the tongue—delicious, but not exactly hearty food.

Two hours after lunch, the stranger asked the widow to ride out with him; which she did, in the puffiest and silkiest of dresses, and with a lace parasol, lined with pink, between her and the sun. This was one of her snares, for she depended on that pink lining for her blushes, having left them a good way behind her somewhere about the first wedding.

The drive was paradisical. They talked, they smiled, they said the loveliest little things to each other with delicious reciprocity. He drove, and divided his manly attentions between her and the horses, giving her a generous share, which was creditable to him as a man.