Looking up from it to address Carlotta, I was startled to find in her face an exact counterpart of the picture, only her features were childish and immature. Her beauty was the bud, this the perfect bloom.
“Will she be like this when she is grown? Heavens! how I would adore her!” I thought, as I gazed from one to the other and marked the points of resemblance.
I had ever regarded Carlotta as a pretty child, whom everybody admired, but I had not thought of her as growing up into the perfect, lovely woman; but now a strange indescribable unrest awoke in my heart, and I felt that I should be far more unhappy when she was gone than I had thought.
While I had never, and could not then think of loving her, save as a friend and brother, yet the reflection that she was going away to forget me and perhaps to love another, was galling in the extreme to my feelings, both of pride and disappointment.
“Carlotta,” I said, handing the picture back to her with a compliment, and looking at her with a newly awakened interest, “I fear that amid all the splendor and novelty of the scenes through which you will soon pass, you will forget almost that I ever lived.”
“No, indeed,” she replied, looking at me frankly, “there is no danger of that; gratitude, if nothing else, will keep your memory ever fresh with me.”
“But you will be a grown lady ere you return, and will, I know, have many admirers. You will love some one of them, and I will be only a cipher in your past.”
“No, no, you have been too noble and good to me. Do you think me so base? Here!” and taking a pair of scissors from her box, she cut off a long curling ringlet of hair and put it in my hand, “keep that as my pledge that I will remember you every day while I am gone, and no matter when we meet again I promise to redeem it, as the same little Carlotta you have been so kind to.”
“Thank you, Carlotta, I will treasure it carefully,” I said, folding it up with a strange thrill of pleasure for only a child’s simple gift.
Father and mother came back now, and after a few words of parting and some tears, I bade them good-bye and hastened down to the office, as I was to return to Durham’s on the night train.