"You did not see her," he cried. "You do not know with what charms she works, when she wishes to comfort and allure." Ah! did I not. "And Philo," he went on, almost humbly for him, "you are mistaken if you think she had any hand in the ruin which has come upon me. She had not. How I know it I cannot say, but I am ready to swear it, and you must forget any foolish fears I may have shown or any foolish words I may have uttered in the first confusion of my loss and disappointment."
"I will forget," said I.
"The fact is I do not understand her," he eagerly explained. "There was innocence in her air, but there was mockery too, and she laughed as I talked of my grief and rage, as though she thought I was playing a part. It was merry laughter, and there was no ring of falsehood in it, but why should she laugh at all?"
This was a question I could not answer; who could? Juliet is beyond the comprehension of us all.
"But what is the use of plaguing myself with riddles?" he now asked, starting up as suddenly as he had sat down. "We are to be married in a month, and the Colonel—I have seen the Colonel—has promised to dance at our wedding. Will it be in the new stone house? It would be a fitting end to this comedy if he were to dance in that?"
I thought as Orrin did about this, but with more seriousness perhaps; and it was not till after he had left me that I remembered I had not asked whom he suspected of firing his house, now that he was assured of the innocence of her who was most likely to profit by its burning.
"Now I understand Juliet!" was the cry with which Orrin burst into my presence late this afternoon. "Men are saying and women whispering that I destroyed my own house, in order to save myself the shame of accepting the Colonel's offer while I had a roof of my own." And, burning with rage, he stamped his foot upon the ground, and shook his hand so threateningly in the direction of his fancied enemies that I felt some reflection of his anger in my own breast, and said or tried to say that they could not know him as I did or they would never accuse him of so mean a deed, whatever else they might bring against him.
"It makes me wild, it makes me mad, it makes me feel like leaving the town forever!" was his hoarse complaint as I finished my feeble attempt at consolation. "If Juliet were half the woman she ought to be she would come and live with me in a log-cabin in the woods before she would accept the Colonel's house now. And to think that she, she should be affected by the opinions of the rest, and think me so destitute of pride that I would stoop to sacrifice my own home for the sake of stepping into that of a rival's. O woman, woman, what are you made of? Not of the same stuff as we men, surely."
I strove to calm him, for he was striding fiercely and impatiently about the room. But at my first word he burst forth with: