Nature's Serial Story

by Edward Payson Roe

"You do yourself injustice," said Amy, warmly. "I'm the better and happier for having known you. Papa had a morbid horror of fashionable society, and this accounts for my being so unsophisticated. With all your experience of such society, I have perfect faith in you, and could trust you implicitly."

"Have you truly faith in me?" (and Amy thought she had never seen such depth and power in human eyes as in those of Miss Hargrove, who encircled the young girl with her arm, and looked as if seeking to detect the faintest doubt).

"Yes," said Amy, with quiet emphasis.

Miss Hargrove drew a long breath, and then said: "That little word may do me more good than all the sermons I ever heard. Many would try to be different if others had more faith in them. I think that is the secret of your power over the rough man that has just gone. You recognized the good that was in him, and made him conscious of it. Well, I must try to deserve your trust." Then she stepped out on the dusky piazza, and sighed, as she thought: "It may cost me dear. She seemed troubled at my words to Burt, and stole away as if she were the awkward third person. I may have misjudged her, and she cares for him after all."

Amy went to the piano, and played softly until summoned without by an excited exclamation from her friend. A line of fire was creeping toward them around a lofty highland, and it grew each moment more and more distinct. "Oh, I know from its position that it's drawing near our tract," cried Amy. "If it is so bright to us at this distance, it must be almost terrible to those near by. I suppose they are all up there just in front of it, and Burt is so reckless." She was about to say Webb, but, because of some unrecognized impulse, she did not. The utterance of Burt's name, however, was not lost on Miss Hargrove.

For a long time the girls watched the scene with awe, and each, in imagination, saw an athletic figure begrimed with smoke, and sending out grotesque shadows into the obscurity, as the destroying element was met and fought in ways unknown to them, which, they felt sure, involved danger. Miss Hargrove feared that they both had the same form in mind. She was not a girl to remain long unconscious of her heart's inclinations, and she knew that Burt Clifford had quickened her pulses as no man had ever done before. This very fact made her less judicial, less keen, in her insight. If he was so attractive to her, could Amy be indifferent to him after months of companionship? She had thought that she understood Amy thoroughly, but was beginning to lose faith in her impression. While in some respects Amy was still a child, there were quiet depths in her nature of which the young girl herself was but half conscious. She often lapsed into long reveries. Webb's course troubled her. Never had he been more fraternal in his manner, but apparently she was losing her power to interest him, to lure him away from the material side of life. "I can't keep pace with him," she sighed; "and now that he has learned all about my little range of thoughts and knowledge, he finds that I can be scarcely more to him than Johnnie, whom he pets in much the same spirit that he does me, and then goes to his work or books and forgets us both. He could help me so much, if he only thought it worth his while! I'm sure I'm not contented to be ignorant, and many of the things that he knows so much about interest me most."

Thus each girl was busy with her thoughts, as they sat in the warm summer night and watched the vivid line draw nearer. Mr. Clifford and Maggie came out from time to time, and were evidently disturbed by the unchecked progress of the fire. Alf had gone with his father, and anything like a conflagration so terrified Johnnie that she dared not leave her mother's lighted room.

Suddenly the approaching line grew dim, was broken, and before very long even the last red glow disappeared utterly. "Ah," said Mr. Clifford, rubbing his hands, "they have got the fire under, and I don't believe it reached oar tract."

"How did they put it out so suddenly?" Miss Hargrove asked. "Were they not fighting it all the time?"

"The boys will soon be here, and they can give you a more graphic account than I. Mother is a little excited and troubled, as she always is when her great babies are away on such affairs, so I must ask you to excuse me."