As to the objects of this anxiety, they were upon the veranda of the cottage, quite unconscious of the necessity of digging into their own minds. He was seated, and she was leaning against the railing on which the honeysuckle climbed, pulling a flower in pieces.
“It is such a short time I have known you,” she was saying, as if in apology for her own feeling.
“Yes, in one way;” and he leaned forward, and broke his sentence with a little laugh. “I think I must have known you in some pre-existent state.”
“Perhaps. And yet, in another way, it seems long—a whole month, you know.” And the girl laughed a little in her turn.
“It was the longest month I ever knew, after you left the city.”
“Was it? I oughtn't to have said that first. But do you know, Mr. Henderson, you seem totally different from any other man I ever knew.”
That this was a profound and original discovery there could be no doubt, from the conviction with which it was announced. “I felt from the first that I could trust you.”
“I wish”—and there was genuine feeling in the tone—“I were worthier of such a generous trust.”
There was a wistful look in her face—timidity, self-depreciation, worship—as Henderson rose and stood near her, and she looked up while he took the broken flower from her hand. There was but one answer to this, and in spite of the open piazza and the all-observant, all-revealing day, it might have been given; but at the moment Miss Forsythe was seen hurrying towards them through the shrubbery. She came straight to where they stood, with an air of New England directness and determination. One hand she gave to Henderson, the other to Margaret. She essayed to speak, but tears were in her eyes, and her lips trembled; the words would not come. She regarded them for an instant with all the overflowing affection of a quarter of a century of repression, and then quickly turned and went in. In a moment they followed her. Heaven go with them!
After Henderson had made his hasty adieus at our house and gone, before the sun was down, Margaret came over. She came swiftly into the room, gave me a kiss as I rose to greet her, with a delightful impersonality, as if she owed a debt somewhere and must pay it at once—we men who are so much left out of these affairs have occasionally to thank Heaven for a merciful moment—seized my wife, and dragged her to her room.