For an instant the same flush rose again on the cheek of Margaret Hayley; then she forced it away, smiled, and said:
"Certainly! why not? Carlton Brand kisses me, sometimes, and I have more than once kissed him back. What is that to you, sauce-box, when we are engaged to be married?"
"What is that to me? Every thing! Joy—happiness—to know that I am going to have so dear a sister!" cried the little one, throwing both her arms, this time, around the pliant waist of Margaret and hugging her in a perfect transport of delight, which seemed quite shared in, though more tranquilly, by the object of the demonstration.
The saddest, cruellest thing in all the lyric drama is the blast of De Sylva's horn on Ernani's wedding morning, calling him in one instant from happy love to dishonor or death. Neither in romance nor in nature should such sudden transitions occur. Alas, for humanity! they do occur in both, not occasionally but habitually. The Duchess of Richmond's ball—then Waterloo. De Joinville springs on board his flag-ship to sail for the attack on Vera Cruz, in the very ball dress in which he has been dancing the whole night through with the republican belles at Castle Garden. The Pall is over every thing of earth: how sadly and how inevitably it droops above the Banner! No scene upon earth could have been more exquisitely peaceful, and few could have been lovelier, than that which surrounded and comprehended those two fair girls in their embrace upon the piazza. Wealth, youth, beauty, good feeling, happiness—all were there; and love blent with friendship, for was not the embrace, given by Elsie Brand and accepted by Margaret Hayley, both given and accepted quite as much for her brother's sake as her own? It was fitting, then, according to the sad fitness of earth, that the element of discord should enter into the peaceful and the beautiful.
The officer spurred by, as we have seen him do, gazing only with our incorporeal eyes. Both the young girls, just releasing each other from their embrace, saw the dark cloud of war sweeping between them and the sunlit grain fields. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back, as if the incongruity jarred her nature. Margaret Hayley instantly lifted her proud neck the higher, as if something in her nature sympathized with every suggestion of the struggle, and as if she was, indeed, insensibly riding on with the hurrying horseman.
"And what does the shudder mean, little one?" asked Margaret, who had plainly distinguished it at the moment of release.
"I hate war, and every thing connected with it!" was the reply, the tone almost petulant.
"And I do not hate it, painful as it may be in many particulars," said Margaret. "Force and energy are the noblest developments in life. Bravery is the nearest possible approach to that divine character which knows no superior and consequently fears none."
"Nearer to the divine than love?" asked the little one.
Just for one instant, again, that roseate tint on the cheek of Margaret, as she said: "Nobler, if not nearer to the divine; and sorry as I must be to see the bloodshed caused by a civil war in my native land, I am almost glad that it has occurred, sometimes, as a means of rousing the sluggish pulses of men who would otherwise have stagnated in trade and pleasure, and proving that we yet possess something of the hero spirit of old."