From Jest to Earnest

by Edward Payson Roe

Providence had given to Lottie the chance to live the life of ideal womanhood,—the life of love and devotion,—and she did not mean to lose it. While her high spirit would often chafe with a little wholesome friction, it would yet grow sweeter and more patient under the trials of the hardest lot, if they could only be endured at his side to whom, by some mystic necessity of her being, she had given her heart.

Therefore, with unmingled satisfaction she saw that she was sapping the student's stern resolution not to speak. She would, by a witchery as innocent as subtile, beguile him into just the opposite of what he had proposed. As she had declared to her uncle, he should ask her, in a very humble manner, to become a home missionary, and she, under the circumstances, was more ready to comply than to become Empress of all the Russias.

But, during the remainder of the ride, she made the time pass all too quickly, as she led him to speak of his student life, his Western home, and especially of his mother; and Lottie smiled appreciatively over the enthusiasm and affection which he manifested for one concerning whom she had ever heard Mrs. Marchmont speak a little slightingly. The genuine interest which she took in all that related to Mrs. Hemstead touched the young man very closely, and his whole nature was getting under arms against what his heart was beginning to characterize as a most unnatural and stupid resolution.

De Forrest was greatly relieved as he heard Hemstead describing his humble, farm-house home and toiling mother; for the student softened none of the hard outlines of their comparative poverty.

"The great fool!" thought the exquisite. "Even if Lottie were inclined to care for him somewhat, he has repelled her now by revealing his common and poverty-stricken surroundings."

But as Lottie became satisfied that Hemstead would not be able to go away in silence, a new cause of trouble and perplexity claimed her attention. Not that she had not thought of it often since she had realized how irrevocably she had given her love, but other and more immediate questions had occupied her mind. How was she to reconcile her fashionable mother and worldly father to her choice? She clearly recognized that what to her seemed the most natural—indeed, the only thing in life left for her—would appear to one simply monstrous, and to the other the baldest folly.

She loved her parents sincerely, for, with all her faults, she had never been cold-hearted; and, while she proposed to be resolute, it was with the deepest anxiety and regret that she foresaw the inevitable conflict.

But when she was at a loss to think of anything that could be said to soften the blow, or make her course appear right or reasonable, as they would look at it, a circumstance occurred which led, as she then believed, to the solution of the problem.

After driving between two and three hours, they reached West Point in safety, and, as they were passing along by the officers' quarters, Lottie recognized a young lady who was one of her most intimate city friends, and who, she soon learned, was making a visit in the country, like herself. Lottie told Bel and Addie to go on to the dancing-hall, while she called on her friend, adding, "I will soon join you."

The relations between Lottie and her friend were rather confidential, and the latter soon bubbled over with her secret. She was engaged to a cadet, who would graduate in the following June.