"Millie, darling," faltered her mother, "God knows I'd shield your heart with my own if I could, but I don't know how to help you. You are too much like me. Your love is your life, and you can't stop loving just because it would be wise and thrifty to do so. I think of you almost as much as I do of Martin, and I daily pray the merciful Saviour, who was 'tempted in all points like as we are,' to sustain and comfort you. I don't see how I can help you in any other way, for my own heart shows me just how you suffer."
"There, little mother," said Mildred, raising her head and wiping her eyes, "I've had my cry, and feel the better for it. I'm going to help you and papa and be brave. I'm glad I'm like you. I'm glad I'm a true Southern girl, and that I can love as you loved; and I would despise myself if I could invest my heart and reinvest it like so much stock. Such a woman is cold-blooded and unnatural, and you are the dearest little mother and wife that ever breathed."
"Oh, Millie, Millie, if I had only foreseen and guarded against this evil day!"
"Come, dear mamma, don't always be blaming yourself for what you did not foresee. You are eager to do your best now, and that is all God or man can ask of us. These clouds will pass away some time, and then the sunshine will be all the brighter."
The next few days of waiting and uncertainty were a severer ordeal to Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred than ever. Mr. Jocelyn, bent on gaining time, kept putting them off. His new duties upon which he had entered, he wrote, left him only the evening hours for his quest of rooms, and he had not succeeded in finding any that were suitable. Thus they expected something definite by every mail, but each day brought renewed disappointment. At last Mildred wrote that she would come down herself if he did not decide upon something at once.
The morning after this letter was despatched the young girl took her work out under some wide-boughed hemlocks that stood beside the quiet country road, along which a farmer occasionally jogged to the village beyond, but which at that hour was usually quite deserted. Fred and Minnie were with her, and amused themselves by building little log huts with the dry sticks thickly scattered around.
To Roger, who was cradling oats in an adjacent field, they made a picture which would always repeat itself whenever he passed that clump of hemlocks; and, as he cut his way down the long slope toward them, under the midsummer sun, he paused a second after each stroke to look with wistful gaze at one now rarely absent from his mental vision. She was too sad and preoccupied to give him a thought, or even to note who the reaper was. From her shady retreat she could see him and other men at work here and there, and she only envied their definite and fairly rewarded toil, and their simple yet assured home-life, while she was working so blindly, and facing, in the meantime, a world of uncertainty. Roger had been very unobtrusive since her father's departure, and she half consciously gave him credit for this when she thought about him at all, which was but seldom. He had imagined that she had grown less distant and reserved, and once or twice, when he had shown some little kindness to the children, she had smiled upon him. He was a hunter of no mean repute in that region, and was famous for his skill in following shy and scarce game. He had resolved to bring the principles of his woodcraft to bear upon Mildred, and to make his future approaches so cautiously as not to alarm her in the least; therefore he won the children's favor more thoroughly than ever, but not in an officious way. He found Belle moping the evening after her father's departure, and he gave her a swift drive in his buggy, which little attention completely disarmed the warm-hearted girl and became the basis of a fast-ripening friendship.
"You need not put on such distant airs," she had said to Mildred; "he never mentions your name any more." But when he asked Mrs. Jocelyn to take a drive with him she had declined very kindly, for she feared that he might speak to her of her daughter in an embarrassing way. Over Belle, Mildred had little control in such matters, but as far as she and her mother were concerned she determined that he should have no encouragement whatever; for, although he made no further efforts either to shun or obtain her society, and had become quite as reserved as herself, he unconsciously, yet very clearly, revealed his state of mind to her womanly intuition.
"There is one thing queer about Roger Atwood," said Belle, joining her sister under the hemlocks; "he now scarcely ever speaks of himself. I suppose he thinks I'd be silly enough to go and tell everything as you did."
"What do you talk about then?" asked Mildred, with a half smile.