“Or seven,” added Mittie. “Oh! he is sufficiently youthful, I dare say, but it is amusing to see how that name is fastened upon him. It is seldom we hear Doctor Hazleton mentioned. He does not look a day older than when he prescribed for you, Helen, in your yellow flannel night-gown. He had a look of precocious wisdom then, which becomes him better now.”
Mittie began to think Helen very stupid, to say nothing of the dazzling Clinton, to whom she had taken particular pains to introduce her, when she suddenly asked her, “How long that very handsome young gentleman was going to remain?”
“You think him handsome, then,” cried Mittie, making a veil of the flaxen ringlets of Alice, so that Helen could not see the high color that suffused her face.
“I think he is the handsomest person I ever saw,” replied Helen, just as if she were speaking of a beautiful picture or statue; “and yet there is something, I cannot tell what, that I do not exactly like about him.”
“You are fastidious,” said Mittie, coldly, and the sudden gleam of her eye reminding her of the Mittie of other days, Helen closed her weary lips.
Tho next morning, she sprang from her bed light and early as the sky-lark. All traces of languor, indisposition and fatigue had vanished in the deep, tranquil, refreshing slumbers of the night. She awoke with the joyous consciousness of being at home beneath her father’s roof. She was not a boarder, subject to a thousand restraints, necessary but irksome. She was not compelled any more to fashion her movements to the ringing of a bell, nor walk according to the square and compass. She was free. She could wander in the garden without asking permission. She could run too, without incurring the imputation of rudeness and impropriety. The gyves and manacles of authority had fallen from her bounding limbs, and the joyous and emancipated school-girl sang in the gladness and glee of her heart.
Alice still slept—the door of Mittie’s chamber was closed, and every thing was silent in the household, when she flew down stairs, rather than walked, and went forth into the dewy morn. The sun was not yet risen, but there was a deepening splendor of saffron and crimson above the horizon, fit tapestry for the pavilion of a God. The air was so fresh and balmy, it felt so young and inspiring, Helen could hardly imagine herself more than five years old. Every thing carried her back to the earliest recollections of childhood. There were the swallows flying in and out of their little gothic windows under the beetling barn-eaves; and there were the martins, morning gossips from time immemorial, chattering at the doors of their white pagodas, with their bright red roofs and black thresholds. The old England robin, with its plumage of gorgeous scarlet, dashed with jet, swung in its airy nest, suspended from the topmost boughs of the tall elms, and the blue and yellow birds fluttered with warbling throats among the lilac’s now flowerless but verdant boughs. Helen hardly knew which way to turn, she was so full of ecstacy. One moment she wished she had the wings of the bird, the next, the petals of the flower, and then again she felt that the soul within her, capable of loving and admiring all these, was worth a thousand times more. The letters carved on the silver bark of the beech arrested her steps. They were new. She had never seen them before, and when she saw the blended ciphers, a perception of the truth dawned upon her understanding. Perhaps there never was a young maiden of sixteen years, who had more singleness and simplicity of heart than Helen. From her shy and timid habits, she had never formed those close intimacies that so often bind accidentally together the artless and the artful. She was aware of the existence of love, but knew nothing of its varying phases. Its language had never been breathed into her ear, and she never dreamed of inspiring it. Could it be that it was love, which had given such a glow and lustre to Mittie’s face, which had softened the harshness of her manners, and made her apparently accessible to sisterly tenderness?
While she stood, contemplating the wedded initials, in a reverie so deep as to forget where she was, she felt something fall gently on her head, and a shower of fragrance bathed her senses. Turning suddenly round, the first rays of the rising sun glittered on her face, and gilt the flower-crown that rested on her brow. Clinton stood directly behind her, and his countenance wore a very different expression from what it did the preceding evening. And certainly it was difficult to recognize the pale, drooping, spiritless traveler of the previous night, in the bright, beaming, blushing, shy, wildly-sweet looking fairy of the morning hour.
Helen was not angry, but she was unaffectedly frightened at finding herself in such close proximity with this very oppressively handsome young man; and without pausing to reflect on the silliness and childishness of the act, she flew away as rapidly as a startled bird. It seemed as if all the reminiscences of her childhood pressed home upon her in the space of a few moments. Just as she had been arrested years before, when fleeing from the snake that invaded her strawberry-bed, so she found herself impeded by a restraining arm; and looking up she beheld her friend, the young doctor, his face radiant with a thousand glad welcomes.
“Oh! I am so glad to see you once again,” exclaimed Helen, yielding involuntarily to the embrace, which being one moment withheld, only made her heart throb with double joy.