From Jest to Earnest

by Edward Payson Roe

"You cannot feel otherwise, Miss Marsden. You have been seeking to keep and use for yourself what God meant you should use for Him. You feel very much as you would, did you take a large sum of money, left in your hands as a sacred trust, and go on a pleasure trip with it. He has intrusted to you the richest and rarest gifts, and every day that you have misappropriated them is a burden upon your conscience. You will feel the same after a long life of adulation, in which every whim has been gratified. Believe me, Miss Marsden, it is a very sad thing to come to the end of one's life with no other possession than a burdened conscience and a heavy, guilty heart. I long to save you from such a fate. That would be a wretchedly poor result of a lifetime for one endowed as you are."

"Your words are very severe, Mr. Hemstead," she said in a low tone, burying her face in her hands.

"Faithful are the wounds of a friend," he replied.

"I never thought I could permit any one to speak to me as you have done, nor would I endure it from you, did I not recognize something like sympathy in the voice with which you speak such cutting words. But I fear they are true, after all. A burdened conscience and a guilty heart seem all there is of me to-night."

He was about to reverse the picture, and portray in strong and hopeful terms what she might be, and what she could accomplish, when the sleigh-bells announced the return of the rest of the party. She sprang up and said hastily: "I do not wish to meet them to-night, and so will retire at once. As physician of the 'mind diseased' you dearly believe in what is termed the 'heroic treatment.' Your scalpel is sharp, and you cut deeply. But as proof that I have kept my word, and am not offended, I give you my hand."

He took it in both of his, but did not speak. She looked up at him through the tears that still lingered, and was touched to see that his eyes were as moist as hers. Giving his hand a cordial pressure, she said as she left him: "You cannot look at me in harsh criticism through tears of sympathy. Your face is kinder than your words. I am glad you do not despise me."

Hemstead admitted Harcourt and the young ladies into the shadowy hall, and then bade them good night. He, too, was in no mood for Addie's gossip or Bel's satire. They had also found Harcourt strangely silent and pre-occupied.

The evident influence of Miss Martell over Harcourt, and their intimate relations require some explanation. He was an orphan, and his father had been a friend of Mr. Martell. During the last illness of the elder Mr. Harcourt, he had asked his friend to take some interest in his son, and, when possible, to give him friendly counsel. To a man like Mr. Martell such a request was like a sacred obligation; and he had sought to do more than was asked. He wrote the young man almost fatherly letters, and often invited him to his house. Thus it came about that the influence of Mr. Martell and his daughter did more to restrain the wayward tendencies of young Harcourt than all other things combined; and it must be confessed that the little blue-eyed girl had more influence than the wise old father. She seemed to take almost a sisterly interest in him, and occasionally wrote such a sweet little letter that he would reform his college life for a week thereafter. But he seemed to have a dash of wild blood that would break out only too often into indiscretions, the rumors of which filled his kind friend Mr. Martell with anxiety. But Alice, his daughter ever insisted that he would "come out all right."

"Tom has a good heart, father," she would say; and so, with woman's faith, she hoped where her father feared.

If Harcourt could have been continually under their influence he would undoubtedly have developed into a far better man. But, between absence at college and the law-school and some travel during vacations, he saw less and less of them. Alice also was kept very steadily at school, and during the last two years of her studies they had missed each other in vacations, and seldom met.