“Aunt!” Paula was shocked and perplexed. A breaking wave full of doubts and possibilities, seemed to dash over her at this suggestion.
“Young men of judgment and principle do not come so many miles to see a youthful maiden, without a purpose,” continued her aunt inexorably. “You know that, do you not, Paula?”
“Yes; but the purpose may differ in different cases,” returned the young girl hurriedly. “I would not like to believe that Mr. Ensign came here with the one you give him credit for—not yet. You trouble me, aunt,” pursued she, glancing tremulously about. “It is like opening a great door flooded with sunshine, upon eyes scarcely strong enough to bear the glimmer sifting through its cracks. I feel humiliated and—” She did not finish, perhaps her thought itself was incomplete.
“If a light comes sifting through the cracks, I am satisfied,” said her aunt in a lighter tone than common. And she kissed her niece, and went smiling out of the room, murmuring to herself,
“I have been over-fearful; everything is coming right.”
There are moments when life’s great mystery overpowers us; when the riddle of the soul flaunts itself before us unexplained, and we can do no more than stand and take the rush of the tide that comes sweeping down upon us. Paula was not the girl she was before she went to New York. Love was no longer a dreamy possibility, a hazy blending of the unknown and the fancied; its tale had been too often breathed in her ear, its reality made too often apparent to her eye. But love to which she could listen, was as new and fresh and strange, as a world into which her foot had never ventured. That her aunt should point to a certain masculine form, no matter how attractive or interesting, and say, “Love and home are the lot of women,” made her blood rush back on her heart, like a stream from which a dam has been ruthlessly wrenched away. It was too wild, too sudden; a friend’s name was so much easier to speak, or to contemplate. She did not know what to do with her own heart, made to speak thus before its time; its beatings choked her; everything choked her; this was a worse imprisonment than the other. Looking round, her eye fell upon the flowers. Ah, was not their language expressive enough, without this new suggestion? They seemed to lose something in this very gain. She liked them less she thought, and yet her feet drew near, and near, and nearer, to where they stood, exhaling their very souls out in delicious perfume. “I am too young!” came from Paula’s lips. “I will not think of it!” quickly followed. Yet the smile with which she bent over the fragrant blossoms, had an ethereal beauty in it, which was not all unmixed with the
“Light that never was on land or sea,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
“He has asked to be my friend,” murmured she, as she slowly turned away. “It is enough; it must be enough.” But the blossom she had stolen from the midst of the fragrant collection, seemed to whisper a merry nay, as it nodded against her hand, and afterwards gushed out its sweet life on her pure young breast.