“How grateful,” he began, after a broken salutation—“how grateful I should be for this obliging attention to the note I sent you, soliciting a meeting which—”
“Which my gallant preserver of old will be pretty sure to misconstrue, I fear me,” interrupted the maiden, with a half-murmured, sportive laugh.
“No, Miss Haviland,” he replied, too intent on a serious demonstration of his feelings to respond in the same spirit—“no, I am not so presuming; nor do I wish to count on the former service, which you so magnify, and which has induced you, perhaps, to grant this interview.”
“In part, I confess,” was the answer to this implied question.
“I suspected—I feared so,” he rejoined, despondingly. “Would to Heaven you could have acted entirely aside from that motive, and then I might have found cause to hope. But now,” he added, with suppressed emotion—“now—But O, how can I harbor the chilling thought of being doomed to love without a return! Say, fairest and best, must this indeed be so?”
The downcast look and the quick-heaving bosom were the only reply; and the impassioned lover, gathering courage even from these uncertain indications, proceeded:—
“Years, eventful years, have passed away, my dear Miss Haviland, since your face, like some unexpected vision, first greeted my sight, and its image, at the same moment, as a thing not to be resisted, sunk deep into my heart. And there, from that hour to this, it has constantly remained—remained in spite of all my attempts to exclude it; for I struggled hard to banish it, as I had so much reason to do. You were the daughter of wealth and prosperity—I the son of poverty and misfortune; and, what was more revolting to my pride, you were found with my political opponents—my oppressors—nay, in the closest connection, apparently, with my bitterest foe. But with all the aid which these thoughts and associations were calculated to lend me, I struggled in vain. And when I was driven, poor, sorrowing, and desperate, from my home, by the wrongs and insults of this same man, of whose position towards you I was not left in doubt, I carried that image with me. It would not be eradicated; it would not even fade; but became more deeply impressed, and grew more and more vivid with time and change. In the stirring scenes of military life into which I then entered,—in the hour of battle, the exhausting march, the horrors of a prisonship, the perilous escape, and the lone wanderings through the wilderness, till I again reached the soil of freedom,—in all these, the impress remained unweakened, constantly presenting itself to my thoughts by day, and shaping my dreams by night. And it was this, when, on my return, I came into this quarter, where I had learned our scattered troops were rallying, and where I found myself near you—it was this that brought me to your father's dwelling—it was this, which, in spite of the coldness of my reception by all but yourself, urged me to the repeated visit, in which I was driven with insults from your house.”
“Not by me, Mr. Woodburn,” interposed the fair listener, in kindly and earnest tones—“not by me, nor by my consent or sanctioning. And it was mainly to show you this that I was induced to grant your request for this, on my part, I fear, imprudent meeting. No! O, no, sir, I have never forgotten—I can never forget—to whom I am indebted for my life; and gratitude as well as respect for his general character, will ever forbid aught but kind and courteous treatment at my hands. And I hope you will make some allowance for my father, who feels so strongly that the people, whose cause you espouse, are criminally wrong.”
“I do make an allowance,” responded Woodburn—“great allowance for his imbittered state of mind towards the defenders of the American cause; but does that fully account for the course he pursues towards me?”
“To be frank with you, sir, it does not,” she replied, after some hesitation. “There are those often with my father, who are not backward in fanning his prejudices, and perhaps in instigating the undeserved treatment you have received. I may be unwise in saying this; but justice to all, it appears to me, requires that you should be apprised of it. You will not surely make use of this to embroil us?”