Long before he had finished reading she had bowed her head upon her hands, but there came no sound. At last he laid the letter down, and then bent over her.
"Grace,—darling!"
Slowly she lifted her eyes and looked up in his face. All the light, all the joy and gladness had fled. Her lips moved as though to question, but a hard, dry lump seemed to have formed in her throat; she could not speak. His strong hands trembled as they gently raised her from the lowly attitude in which she had been crouching at his knee. He would have drawn her to his breast again, but she put her little hands upon his shoulder and held herself back. Twice she essayed to speak before the words came,—
"Jack, God knows I have tried to be ready for this. But is there no way? I never thought to stand between you and your duty—your honor. I would not—I would not now if I were—all. Oh, Jack,—my husband, there—there is another reason."
CHAPTER V.
MARION SANFORD.
As a school-girl Marion Sanford started by being unpopular. On first acquaintance there were very few girls in Madame Reichard's excellent establishment who did not decide that she was cold and unsympathetic. Courteous, well-bred, self-possessed, she was to a fault, but—unpardonable sin in school-girl eyes—she shrank from those dear and delicious intimacies, those mushroom friendships of our tender years, that are as explosive as fire-crackers and as evanescent as the smoke thereof. The volumes of satire that have been written on the subject have exhausted the field and rendered new ideas out of the question, but they have in no wise diminished the impetuosity with which such friendships are daily, hourly entered into, and they never will. Ours is a tale which has little that is new and less that is didactic. Army life and army loves differ, after all, but little from those which one sees in every community. Human nature is the same the world over, despite our different tenets and traditions. Boys are as full of mischief and sure to get into scrapes as in the days of Elijah and the bears. Girls have had their sweet secrets and desperate intimacies with one another since long before Elijah was heard of. Nothing one can say is apt to put a stop to what the Almighty set in motion. Let us not rail at what we cannot correct, but make the best of it. Let us accept the truth. School-girls meet, take desperate and sudden fancies, swear eternal friendships, have eternal tiffs and squabbles, kiss and make up, fall out again, and as they grow in grace and wisdom they keep up the system, simply taking a new object every few months. It is one of their weaknesses by divine right, over which common sense has no more control than it has over most of ours.
But Marion Sanford had no such weakness. Being destitute of the longing for intimate and confidential intercourse with some equally romantic sister, she was spared the concomitant heartburnings, recriminations, and enmities. She passed her first year at the school without an intimate friend. She left it without an enemy. Hers was not the most brilliant mind in the class. She was not the valedictorian of the school on that eventful day when,
"Sweet girl-graduates with their shining hair,"