The Heart of Arethusa

by Frances Barton Fox

"You better go on back to the hemp-field then," said Arethusa, "now that you've said it."

Timothy gathered a handful of small stones lying near him and began to idly skip them one by one across the Branch. It was an accomplishment which Arethusa deeply envied him: her stones invariably fell in without skipping. Yet she made no move to show him that she saw how beautifully every single stone that Timothy skipped sped across the top of the water to the other side. Miss Johnson came and sat down between them, worn out in her vain search for her stick, and she panted and gazed inquiringly from one to the other of her playmates, so unusually silent.

"I don't see why," said Timothy suddenly, "that you want to act this way, Arethusa. I've said I was sorry. That ought to be quite enough; and ... and ... Anyway, I don't see why one kiss should make you so mad."

"Oh, you don't?" replied Arethusa, very sarcastically.

Life had seemed a gloomy affair to Timothy since the day he had realized that Arethusa was actually going on this Visit. He did not want her to go, to put it very plainly. Not that he thought she would not have a good time; he thought she would have a good time; in fact, he thought she would have far too good a time, his verbal expression to Arethusa of the contrary idea, notwithstanding. Timothy had made more than one visit to Lewisburg; he was well acquainted with the variety of its attractions. He could not help but vision the oceans of beings of the opposite sex it was inevitable she should meet, and he saw in these meetings his own eclipse as a suitor.

Timothy's Ardent Wish for Arethusa and himself was identical with Miss Asenath's Secret Hope and Miss Eliza's Openly Expressed Desire. And Arethusa had not exaggerated in the least, to Miss Eliza, the number of his proposals. He had been proposing to her every summer with worthy persistence since he was nine or ten, childish though those first proposals may have been; and sometimes twice a summer.

Ever since that time when she had made the first appeal to his chivalry when he had met her, a chubby little scrap of only three scant summers, wandering off down the Pike, every little footfall taking her farther and farther away from the Farm, and she had raised her eyes, brimming over with tears in their wonderful tangle of black lashes, and said, with a tiny catch in her voice, "I'm losted. Tate me home, Boy!"; and he, with the superior knowledge of location which seven years gives over three, had led her safely back to Miss Eliza—ever since that long-past day, Arethusa had made up the most of Timothy's world. They had played together all through childhood and boyhood and girlhood, and quarreled violently and much over their play, and then made up with commendable immediacy; Timothy was the nearest approach to a brother Arethusa had ever known. But Timothy's feeling for Arethusa had ever been, and especially these last few years, more than a brother's love. It was the clean whole-hearted affection which a boy gives to the one girl in the world who seems to him superior to other girls. Even when Timothy had gone away to a neighboring town to college, his allegiance had never for a moment been shaken; in all those four long years he had never seen a single maiden, among the many he had met, who came anywhere near Arethusa in his estimation.

Timothy had had some dim idea that it might be quite wise to get her safely promised to himself before she went away. The last point-blank refusal she had made him, earlier in this summer, had not left him altogether disheartened. He knew Arethusa was given to moods. Then, too, persistence often wins the reluctant; dripping water wears away a stone. There are a great many aphorisms dealing directly with such a state of mind as Timothy's.

So the evening just before this hot September morning, he had dressed himself in his very best and strolled over to the Farm, fully determined on a definite course of action.

He had made his formal proposal for Arethusa's hand to Arethusa herself, as they sat side by side on the top step of the worn stone steps to the front porch. But she had laughed at him, so derisively, that Timothy, goaded into rashness by the laughter, had kissed her with a resounding smack. Then he had been slapped by the indignant Arethusa until his check stung with the pain, sent straight home and told never to come back again as long as he lived.