Nature's Serial Story

by Edward Payson Roe

"How full of sensibility she is!" thought innocent Webb, taking her quickly suppressed emotion as a tribute to his moving reminiscences.

"Oh, Webb, have done with your lugubrious ancient history!" cried Burt, springing up.

"It's time we were getting ready for a homeward move," said Maggie. "I'll go and pack the things."

"And I'll help you," added Miss Hargrove, hastily following her.

"Let me look at the house, too," said Amy, taking the glass; then added, after a moment: "Poor Margaret Arnold! It was indeed a tragedy, as you said, Webb—a sadder one than these old military preparations can suggest. In all his career of war and treachery Arnold never inflicted a more cruel wound."

"How much feeling Miss Hargrove showed!" Webb remarked, musingly.

"Yes," said Amy, quietly, "she was evidently feeling deeply." Her thought was, "I don't believe she heard a word that Webb said." Then, seeing that Burt was helping Maggie and Miss Hargrove, she added, "Please point out to me some other interesting places."

Webb, well pleased, talked on to a listener who did not give him her whole attention. She could not forget Gertrude's paleness, and her alternations from extreme gayety to a look of such deep sadness as to awaken not a little sympathetic curiosity. Amy loved her friend truly, and it did not seem strange to her that Miss Hargrove was deeply interested in Burt, since they had been much thrown together, and since she probably owed her life to him. Amy's resentment toward Burt had passed away. She had found that her pride, merely, and not her heart, was wounded by his new passion, and she already began to feel that she never could have any such regard for him as her friend was possibly cherishing. Therefore it was, perhaps, not unnatural that her tranquil regard should prove unsatisfying to Burt in contrast with the passion of which Miss Hargrove was capable. She had seen his vain efforts to remain loyal, and had smiled at them, proposing to let matters take their course, and to give little aid in extricating him from his dilemma. But, if she had interpreted her friend's face aright, she could no longer stand aloof, an amused and slightly satirical spectator. If Burt deserved some punishment, Gertrude did not, and she was inclined to guess the cause of the latter's haste to return to the city.

It may thus be seen that Amy was fast losing her unsophisticated girlhood. While Burt's passionate words had awakened no corresponding feeling, they had taught her that she was no longer a child, since she could inspire such words. Her intimacy with Miss Hargrove, and the latter's early confidences, had enlarged her ideas on some subjects. As the bud of a flower passes slowly through long and apparently slow stages of immaturity and at last suddenly opens to the light, so she had reached that age when a little experience suggests a great deal, and the influences around her tended to develop certain thoughts very rapidly. She saw that her friend had not been brought up in English seclusion. Admirers by the score had flocked around her, and, as she had often said, she proposed to marry for love. "I have the name of being cold," she once told Amy, "but I know I can love as can few others, and I shall know it well when I do love, too." The truth was daily growing clearer to Amy that under our vivid American skies the grand passion is not a fiction of romance or a quiet arrangement between the parties concerned.

Miss Hargrove had not misjudged herself. Her tropical nature, when once kindled, burned with no feeble, wavering flame. She had passed the point of criticism of Burt. She loved him, and to her fond eyes he seemed more worthy of her love than any man she had ever before known. But she had not passed beyond her sense of truth and duty, and the feeling came to her that she must go away at once and engage in that most pathetic of all struggles that fall to woman's lot. As the conviction grew clear on this bright October day, she felt that her heart was bleeding internally. Tears would come into her eyes at the dreary prospect. Her former brilliant society life now looked as does an opera-house in the morning, when the gilding and tinsel that flashed and sparkled the evening before are seen to be dull and tarnished. Burt had appeared to especial advantage in his mountain home. He excelled in all manly sports. His tall, fine figure and unconscious, easy manner were as full of grace as deficient in conventionality, and she thought with disgust of many of her former admirers, who were nothing if not stylish after the arbitrary mode of the hour. At the same time he had proved that he could be at home in a drawing-room on the simple ground of good-breeding, and not because he had been run through fashion's latest mold. The grand scenery around her suggested the manhood that kindled her imagination—a manhood strong, fearless, and not degenerated from that sturdy age which had made these scenes historic.