"No!" thought Nattie, raising her head proudly, and looking at the red and swollen eyes that gazed at her from the opposite glass. "Life shall give me something of its best; if not of love, then of fame! and I will work and persevere until I gain it!"
Yet, for all of her resolution, Nattie sobbed herself to sleep. Not so easy is it to renounce love, and look forward to a life barren of its best and sweetest gift.
And after this there was a change in her observable even to the undiscerning Quimby. Shadows had fallen over her face, lurked in her gray eyes and around the corners of her mouth. The old restlessness had given place to a settled gloom. She was less often seen among the gay circle that gathered in Cyn's parlor, pleading every possible excuse for staying away, and when with them, to his surprise and delight, and to Celeste's dismay, she devoted herself to Quimby, to Jo—to any one rather than to Clem. For most of all had she changed to him. Afraid of betraying her secret, and unable to control the pain that overpowered her when in his presence, now she knew her own heart, she avoided him in every practicable way, and seldom, even over their wire, talked with him. She was always "tired," or "busy," when he called her now.
Clem, surprised and puzzled by this unaccountable change, at first endeavored to overcome her coolness, but ended by becoming cool in his turn, and talked and joked with Cyn more than ever. And if a touch of the shadows on Nattie's face sometimes crept over his own, she, in her self-engrossment, did not observe it.
If Quimby's hopes burned brighter at this state of affairs, and he was consequently happier, Jo, for some reason unexplained, was not. In fact, he was decidedly queer; now gay, now horribly cynical, not to say morose.
Truly, Cupid, viewed in the character of a telegraphist, was far from being a success; for he had switched everybody off on to the wrong wire!
Cyn, gay unconscious Cyn, no more dreamed of Clem being supposedly in love with her, than she did that Jo was so filled with thoughts of her, that, had he been a different kind of a man, one would have called him desperately in love. But Cyn, unconscious of all this, saw, and with sorrow, the ever-increasing coldness between Nattie and Clem. For she had quite set her heart on the romance that had commenced in dots and dashes culminating in orange blossoms—a Wired Love. But now, to her vexation, she saw her anticipations liable to be set at naught, and herself unable to obtain even a clew to the trouble. Like the "line man," who goes up and down to find why the wires will not work, she could not find the "break" anywhere, and decided that romances, whether "wired" or taken in the ordinary way, were certainly very unwieldy things to manage.
"It seems to me that you do not use that wire very often now," she said one evening to Clem and Nattie, the latter of whom she had forcibly dragged forth from the solitude of her room. "Were it not for me, it would rust. Why! I used to hear your clatter into the small hours, but now—"
"Now we are more sensible," concluded Nattie, leaning over the piano to look at some music. "One gets tired of talking in dots and dashes after a time!"
Poor Nattie's trouble made her bitter sometimes.