Don smiled cheerfully at this tribute to his secretive powers, and sitting down on the edge of the porch, began to explain.
Serene glanced around to see that all were listening, and then slipped quietly out through the kitchen to the high back porch, where she found a seat behind the new patent “creamery,” and leaning her head against it, indulged in the luxury of a few dry sobs. Tears she dared not shed, for tears leave traces. Though “sparkin’” had not been Serene’s line, love may come to any human creature, and little Serene had learned more that spring than the teacher had meant to impart or she to acquire.
When the five minutes she had allotted to her grief were past she went back to the group at the front of the house as unnoticed as she had left them. Her father was chaffing Jessup good-naturedly on his need of more room to grow in, and Don was responding with placid ease. It was not chaff, indeed, that could disturb his convictions as to his personal importance to the development of the great West. Presently he rose and shook hands with them all, including herself—for whom he had no special word—said a general good-by, and left them.
“He’s thinking of himself,” thought Serene a little bitterly, as she watched him go down the yard; “he is so full of his plans and his future he hardly knows I am here. I don’t believe he ever knew it!”
To most people the loss of the possible affection of Don Jessup would not have seemed a heavy one, but the human heart is an incomprehensible thing, and the next six weeks were hard for Serene. For the first time in her life she realized how much we can want that which we may not have, and she rebelled against the knowledge.
“Why?” she asked herself, and “why?” Why should she have cared, since he, it seemed, did not? Why couldn’t she stop caring now? And, oh, why had he been so dangerously kind when he did not care? Poor little Serene! she did not know that we involuntarily feel a tenderness almost as exquisite as that of love itself toward whatever feeds the fountain of our vanity.
Presently, tired of asking herself, she turned to asking Heaven, which is easier. For we cannot comfortably blame ourselves for the inability to answer our own inconvenient inquiries, but Heaven we can both ask and blame. Serene had never troubled Heaven much before, but now, in desperation, she battered at its portals night and day. She did not pray, you understand, to be given the love which many small signs had taught her to believe might be hers, the love that, nevertheless, had not come near to her. Though young, she was reasonable. She instinctively recognized that when we cannot be happy it is necessary for us to be comfortable, if we are still to live. So, after a week or two of rebellion, she asked for peace, sure that if it existed for her anywhere in the universe, God held it in His keeping, for, now, no mortal did.
She prayed as she went about her work by day; she prayed as she knelt by her window at evening, looking out on the star-lit world; she prayed when she woke late in the night and found her room full of the desolate white light of the waning moon, and always the same prayer.
“Lord,” said Serene, “this is a little thing that I am going through. Make me feel that it is a little thing. Make me stop caring. But if you can’t, then show me that you care that I am not happy. If I could feel you knew and cared, I think I might be happier.”
But in her heart she felt no answer, and peace did not come to fill the place of happiness.