"I don't want to hear her talk—I don't care whether she is pleased or not—I only know this—she is not in the least beautiful, and is old enough to be your mother—there!"
"Old enough to be my mother, my mother!" A sudden thrill shot through the youth at the word mother. It sounded so strangely sweet. Had Elizabeth searched the language through, she could not have found two syllables so likely to form a golden link between him and the woman they were talking of.
"Yes, I say it again, she is not pretty, and she's old enough to be your mother—yet you must let the carriage come home with nothing but a trunk in it, while you and the lady take a long, long walk together on the shore, after you had promised to ride with me, too."
"Did I promise? forgive me, Bessie; I quite forgot it."
"Forgot it—while I was waiting and watching with my habit on, and the horses stamping down the gravel in front of the house," cried the aggrieved maiden, and a few spirited tears flashed up to her eyes, and trembled there like dew in a periwinkle. "You may believe it, I was quite ashamed to let the groom see how often I ran out into the porch to look up and down the road. I declare I've almost worn my riding-skirt threadbare with my whip, trying to make the fellows think I only came out to dust my habit."
"Indeed, I'm very sorry!"
"And you all the time promenading along the beach with a strange lady, talking, smiling—oh, I wish I were at home again. It was very cruel of you teasing the governor to consent to our marriage one of these days, if you intended to neglect me in this way."
The youth, whose endowment of patience was by no means marvellous, began to be a little restive under all these reproaches; they disturbed the pleasurable emotions which had predominated with him all the morning. Worse, they impaired the angelic perfection with which his imagination had invested the young girl; the contrast between her childish petulance and the sweet dignity of the woman forced itself upon him. To be lectured and reproached by a mere child so directly after the companionship and sympathy of that lady, struck him with a sense of humiliation. He looked at the young girl gravely till the tears swelled in her eyes, then turned away, angry and hurt.
Lovers' quarrels are mere April showers, giving life to a thousand wild blossoms of the affection when both are in fault, and both angry; but when they end in silence and constraint, the November rain has not a more chilling influence.
While these impulsive young creatures were so busy planting their first thorns, Barbara Stafford had entered her chamber—a large, airy room, with four windows, all draped with filmy muslin, and a large tent-bedstead, shrouded in white till it looked like a snow-drift.