Otherwise, she seemed in every respect, even in the smallest particular, herself. She recollected her music, her studies, her friends. She was anxious to resume her old life at all points. Every day she made allusions to old plans or incidents. She had forgotten absolutely nothing excepting the loverhood of her lover. Every day she grew stronger, and became more and more beautiful, There was a slight under-current of arch mischievousness and half petulance which she had never had before, and which, added to her sweet sympathetic atmosphere, made her indescribably charming. As she grew stronger she frolicked with every human being and every living thing. When the spring first opened and she could be out of doors, she seemed more like a divine mixture of Ariel and Puck than like a mortal maiden.
I found her one day lying at full length on the threshold of the greenhouse. Twenty great azaleas were in full bloom on the shelves--white, pink, crimson. She had gathered handfuls of the fallen blossoms, and was making her gray kitten, which was as intelligent and as well trained as a dog, jump into the air to catch them as she tossed them up. I sat down on the grass outside and watched her silently.
"Oh, you sober old Helen," she said, "you'll be an owl for a thousand years after you die! Why can't you caper a little? You don't know how nice it is."
Just then George came slowly walking down the garden path, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the ground.
He did not see us. Annie exclaimed,--
"There's Cousin George, too! Look at him! Wouldn't you think he had just heard he was to be executed at twelve to-day! I don't see what ails everybody."
"George, George," she called, "come here. For how many years are you sentenced, dear, and how could you have been so silly as to be found out?" And then she burst into a peal of the most delicious laughter at his bewildered look.
"I don't know, darling, for how many years I am sentenced. We none of us know," he said, in a tone which was sadder than he meant it should be, and sobered her loving heart instantly. She sprang to her feet, and threw both her arms around his right arm, a pretty trick she had kept from her babyhood, and said,--
"Oh you dear, good darling, does anything really trouble you? How heartless I am. But you don't know how it feels to have been so awfully ill, and then to get well again. It makes one feel all body and no soul; but I have soul enough to love you all dearly, you know I have; and I won't have you troubled; tell me what it is this minute;" and she looked at him with tears in her eyes.
One wonders often if there be any limit to human endurance. If there be, who can say he has reached it? Each year we find that the thing which we thought had taken our last strength, has left us with strength enough to bear a harder thing. It seemed so with such scenes as this, in those sunny spring days when Annie Ware first went out into life again. Each day I said, "There can never be another moment quite so hard to meet as this!" and the next day there came a moment which made me forget the one which had gone before.