“Do you know, darling,” exclaimed the elder lady in a tone of concern, “you must really not be so nervous; you will be fancying all kinds of things if you give way to such hallucinations. I am afraid that trouble of your brother’s has affected your health. George must take you for a change of air.”
The heightened color on the face of the youthful bride, which had aroused the other’s anxiety, slowly faded from her face, leaving it pale and wan.
By way of reply, Alice stole to her grandmother’s side, and brushing away the silvery hair with which the rising breeze was playing, imprinted a loving kiss on the time-furrowed brow.
“Never mind my fads, dear, tell me your story,” she whispered in the other’s ear, but there was a wistfulness in the tone which impressed her aged relation painfully, and she murmured, as the other sank to her seat, “I wish you would not insist, Alice.”
“O, indeed I do, grandma,” promptly replied the other.
“When I married your grandpa, dear,” began the old lady, I was in delicate health. My mother had only recently died, and the fever to which she had succumbed had wasted my strength also. What with the weakness resulting from my illness and grief at the death of my mother, who had been my only remaining relative, and to whom I was naturally passionately attached, my health was completely broken down, and it was only the urgent wishes of your grandpapa, to whom I had been engaged to be married for more than a year, that I consented to the ceremony at such a time. I felt that I must have change of air, and quickly too, to avoid a complete collapse, and alone in the world as I was, I could not bear to go away and leave behind me the only being that I loved and that loved me.
“Henry too, ‘urged me sair,’ as the old Scottish ballad says, and told me that he could readily make arrangements for a six months’ leave of absence, so that we could spend the winter-months, which were approaching, in the South.
“After the wedding we sailed for Florida, which was at that time enduring one of its occasional, but short-lived, bursts of prosperity. In the old days, long before the war, the State was making money, and the Florida planter as a potentate ranked side by side with the wealthy slave-owner of Mississippi and Louisiana.
“A friend of my husband’s family had a plantation on the Gulf coast of Florida, below Cedar Keys. We had received a pressing invitation to spend our honeymoon on that plantation, and there we finally arrived early in the month of December, after a most delightful voyage.
“At Cedar Keys we had changed our ocean-going ship for a smaller coasting vessel, and as we sailed in our new craft up the waters of the Homosassa River, I thought that not even in my dreams had I pictured, ‘a world so fair.’ The broad, swelling bosom of the river, the luminous transparency of the atmosphere, the banks covered with a wealth and majesty of tropical trees, and the numerous coral islands dotting the centre of the river and crowned with a perfect glory of foliage,—all these thrilled my soul with a sense almost of religious devotion, just as some rare anthem, pealing from some old-world organ, will move the soul to an ecstasy of religious feeling.