“Pray don’t joke, Mary,” said Fred, with strong feeling. “Tell me seriously that all this is true, and that you are happy because of it—because you love me best.”
“It is all true, Fred, and I am happy because of it—because I love you best,” said Mary, in a tone of obedient recitation.
They lingered on the door-step under the steep-roofed porch, and Fred almost in a whisper said—
“When we were first engaged, with the umbrella-ring, Mary, you used to—”
The spirit of joy began to laugh more decidedly in Mary’s eyes, but the fatal Ben came running to the door with Brownie yapping behind him, and, bouncing against them, said—
“Fred and Mary! are you ever coming in?—or may I eat your cake?”
FINALE.
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic—the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world.