To doubt, would be disloyalty—
To falter, would be sin."
And laying her cheek by the side of Rose, Gertrude slept.
The next day was fine, and the faint smile on Rose's pale face was sweet as the much longed-for sunlight. Our travelers descended to the ample drawing-room of the hotel to breakfast.
Rose glanced timidly about, scanning the forms which passed before her, as was her wont at a new place, and then the unsatisfied eye drooped beneath its snowy lid; and they who had been struck with the pensive beauty of her face, gazed upon it unnoticed by its object, whose thoughts were far away.
The tall Indian head-waiter was at his post, as purveyor of corn-cakes and coffee; and excellently well as he filled it, Gertrude protested, as an artist, against such a desecration of his fine athletic form and kingly air.
Human nature is never more en déshabille than in traveling; and Gertrude's bump of mirthfulness found ample food in the length and breadth of the well-filled breakfast-table. The jaded pleasure-seekers, whose fashion-filmed eyes were blind to natural beauty, were talking of "doing the Falls in one hour." The little new-made bride sat there with love-swimming eyes, innocently expecting to escape detection in the disguise of a plain brown traveling-dress: pretty little simpleton! and casting such tell-tale glances at her new husband, too! The half-fledged "freshman" was there, with his incipient beard and his first long-tailed coat, making love and bad puns to a knot of his sister's mischief-loving female friends.
In came the pompous city aristocrat, all dignity and shirt-collar, following his abdomen and the waiter with measured steps and supercilious glance, to the court-end of the table. There, too, was the pale student, feasting his book-surfeited eyes on the pleasanter page of young beauty's April face. There, too, the unsophisticated country girl, too anxious to please, exhausting all her toilet's finery on the breakfast-table. There, too, the poor dyspeptic, surveying with longing eye the tabooed dainties, for which he must pay to Dame Nature if he ate, and to the landlord whether or no.
"Your spirits are at high-water mark this morning," said John to his sister, as Gertrude's quick eye took these notes of her neighbors. "I think you have made up your mind not to grow old. You look as handsome as a picture, this morning."
"As an artist, allow me to tell you that your compliment is a doubtful one," said Gertrude. "And as to old age, which is such a bugbear to most of my sex, I assure you it has no terrors for me. My first gray hair will excite in me no regretful emotions."