True woman of the golden heart!—God in heaven grant that to you and such as you this vision may be no dim unreality! God grant you true hearts against which your own may beat, and faithful arms upon which you may lean when the day of your probation is accomplished I And failing this fruition, the same God of love and peace grant you a truer and more enduring union with hearts that pulsate truly to your own, in that land where the sad wail of "Too Late!" is never heard and where no binding link fetters the limbs or galls the spirit!
"I understand you now," said Richard Crawford. "And yet yours is a strange fancy and would be a dangerous one in many minds. But you are a brave girl, I believe, and that makes all the difference. Besides, you have health and strength, and most of the time high spirits. An invalid—a miserable cripple like myself, housed and shut away, can scarcely hope to understand or appreciate anything that comes freshly in out of God's sunshine!" The old sad and repining spirit had once more come over Richard Crawford, perhaps invoked by something in the young girl's words; and she saw the shadow almost as soon as he felt it. From that moment she was the rattle-pate again, and he caught no more glimpses into the sanctuary of her inner heart. He was to catch no more, forever; for the next time they spoke together in private was after certain events already related had occurred—after her hand had lain in another, in so significant a pressure that no time or change could ever take away the tingle of the blood which it communicated—after her eyes began to open on a new phase of destiny—and after "Ever of Thee" ceased to be a sad abstraction.
Just now she rattled on, as she assisted the invalid back to his room, endeavoring to rouse his once-more sinking spirits, with all her old gayety and abandon.
"You call me brave, do you?" she said. "Dick Crawford, if I was not a little ashamed of you for allowing yourself to have these fits of low spirits, I would tell you something to prove how 'brave' I am! Well, I will tell you, because I know that it is exceedingly improper and I ought not to do so. Two or three weeks ago, spending an evening at Mrs. R——'s, her daughters showed me a suit of clothes belonging to a stripling brother, just gone away to the war. One of them bantered me to put on the suit and go down-stairs among the gentlemen. I thought it would be a good joke, and I tried it. The girls said that I made a very handsome boy—hem! and I suppose that I did. At all events, I went down-stairs and opened the parlor-door, bold as a sheep, when—what do you think happened? Why, I thought, all at once, that all the clothes were sticking tight to my limbs; and when one of the gentlemen came towards me, I grabbed the cloth from the centre-table for a cloak, and played hob with some Bohemian glassware and a few Parisian ornaments, finishing by skedaddling up-stairs a good deal more rapidly than I came down. Was not there 'courage' for you?"
"No want of it, certainly," said Crawford, who had been laughing a little, spite of his low spirits, at the naivete of the relation. "It was modesty and not want of personal courage that drove you out of that very funny position."
"Think so?" said the wild girl. "Then as I am a coward and mean to be known for what I am, I must tell you another story. A few weeks ago I went into a menagerie, and one of the lions made a rush at the bars of his cage—probably because he saw me. There was about as much danger of his getting out, I suppose, as there would have been of my doing so in the same circumstances; but of course I made a fool of myself, got frightened, yelled, and had all the visitors in the menagerie looking at me. How was that? No want of courage? Eh?"
"That," said Richard Crawford, sententiously, "that was the woman."
"Humph!" said Joe, as she once more assisted the invalid to dispose himself comfortably on his usual couch. "Now you will not agree to my estimate of myself, perhaps you will think better of my estimate of you."
"Perhaps so," said Crawford. "Try me."
"Well, then, I have been watching you half the afternoon, and I have made up my mind about you more nearly than ever before."