Thus preached this adorable little high-priest of heroic self-denial, and when she had made an end she burst into tears, and wished that Allan were there to wipe them away.
CHAPTER XVII.
A PICNIC IV THE WOODS.
Winter had passed, and in hot haste—literal hot haste—the time of the singing of birds had come. It was early in the season when the Macleods returned to their summer home, but "lily-footed spring" was there before them. Earth, air, and sky were bathed in a glory of sunlight, which strove to penetrate the dark labyrinth of the pines through which the wind sang. The bay was embowered in gleaming foliage. In its clear waters the Indians plunged or paddled, or lay in attitudes picturesquely inert upon its shores. Above it in graceful curves the unwearying gulls were sinking, rising, and wheeling aloft.
On one of these halcyon days of early summer Rose Macleod was re-reading a letter from her friend Helene; which, though a mere elegant scrawl in the first place, and now yellow and worn with age, has been with some difficulty deciphered by the writers of this veracious history.
"We shall return to Bellevue next week," she wrote, "though what possible benefit can accrue from our returning I cannot pretend to say. Either home is distasteful to me; so is the rest of the world; so are the people in it. Enviable condition, is it not? I seem to be afflicted with a sort of dreadful mental indigestion. Everything I see and hear and read disagrees with me, so I suppose it is only a natural consequence that I should be disagreeable. Oh, dear, dear! What is the good of living, Rose? What is the use or beauty of anything? The Rev. the Archdeacon of York half-playfully says I need to be regenerated. Dr. Widmer says my circulation is weak. Poor mamma says nothing; but she looks a world of reproach. I wish she would take the scriptural rod to me. That would improve the circulation, I fancy; and if it didn't produce a state of regeneration it might at least be a practical step towards it. But I don't know why I should make a jest of my own misery, when I want nothing on earth except to be a little child again, so I could creep off into the long grass somewhere, and cry all my sick heart away. I used to be able to cry when I was five or six years old, but now it is a lost art.
"By the way, speaking of tears reminds me that your friend, Mr. Dunlop, was here last evening, and, while shewing him some views of foreign scenes, we suddenly came across that old, little painting of yourself, in which the artist represented you as a stiff-jointed child, with a row of curls the colour and shape of shavings neatly glued to a little wooden head. You remember how we used to make fun of it. I always said that picture was bad enough to bring tears, and there was actually quite a perceptible moisture in his eyes as he looked at it. Who would have supposed that he possessed so much aesthetic sensibility?
"Well, I am only wearying you, so I will close. Don't be troubled about me, dear. Sometimes I am violently interested in my own unreasonable sufferings, and at other times I am wholly indifferent to them; but nothing can befall my perverse nature that shall alter the tenderness always existing for you in the heart of your loving
HELENE."
Rose read all but the concluding paragraphs aloud to her brother, who, standing at the open door, was looking idly out upon the leaf and blossom of a lovely garden. "What a stream of unalloyed egotism!" he said. "In a woman it's a detestable quality."