Lizzie went to bed very early that night, pleading a headache, and really her face was so pale and the deep violet eyes were so sunk in her head with broad veins of black underneath them, that her assertion was freely borne out by her appearance.
The poor little heart was deeply troubled: the stricken deer was grievously wounded. She was very young, you must remember, and had fallen into that horrible abyss of love without knowing what she was doing. The temptation had been so sweet, the steps she had taken into that rose-coloured paradise so gradual, that she had not perceived the drift of their march, so that Tom’s sudden act and manner had startled and frightened her; it was letting in the sunlight on one who has been blindfolded, and the little secret which she had hugged to her heart alarmed, while it gave her such sweet ecstasy.
Ever since that morning in the garden, only two days ago—two days! it seemed more like two years, she had been so much altered—Lizzie had not been the same. She had awakened from a long sleep as it were, and everything round her, every little inconsiderable item in her daily life bore a new charm to her or had a fresh meaning. A deeper and more beautiful light beamed now in her thoughtful eyes; there was a charming hesitancy in her manner in lieu of the former piquante pert way she had. In a word, Lizzie was our Lizzie still, but a hundred times more loveable and prettier from the new love light that encircled her.
She had been watching—eagerly watching, for her next meeting with Tom, and yet when she thought of him, blushed at her thoughts and trembled with a sly rapture. He was so noble—so manly—so handsome! Just in fact what most young girls think Corydon when in love.
It was no wonder, then, that the brother’s lecture and the idea of the old campaigner’s criticism on her conduct frightened our poor little maid.
She went up to her little bed tearfully and heavy-hearted, and thought of chains and dungeons, and all the malicious contrivances of the wicked for parting true lovers, and she sobbed herself to sleep. When she woke up in the morning she was still in the most restless and perturbed state that her little mind could be in. “How dared that odious old thing speak about her, or look at her, or come round at all!” She would never see Tom again—and she was longing to see him all the time!
She would not go to the pic-nic—that she wouldn’t!
Then she would go, because the aforesaid old odious thing would imagine that she took it to heart if she stopped away.
But she would not go because that impudent Master Tom would be there, she thought, with a rising blush and a conscious swelling of the tender little bosom underneath her muslin dress.
Of course she determined to go!