"No, no, though my heart break while I say it—for, in truth, I am very melancholy, notwithstanding I force a beggar's smile upon my cheek; no, I would not have you stay or stand, Arthur, until you have seen this wretched quarrel at an end. I praised your first resolve—loved you for it—applauded and cheered you; I will not selfishly now, for the sake of my weak, womanish apprehension, say one word to withhold your arm."
"And you are still," said Butler, "that same resolute enthusiast that I found in the young and eloquent beauty who captivated my worthless heart, when the war first drew the wild spirits of the country together under our free banner?"
"The same foolish, conceited, heady, prattling truant, Arthur, that first took a silly liking to your pompous strut, and made a hero to her imagination out of a boasting ensign—the same in all my follies, and in all my faults—only altered in one quality."
"And pray, what is that one quality?"
"I will not tell you," said Mildred carelessly. "'Twould make you vainer than you are."
"It is not well to hide a kind thought from me, Mildred."
"Indeed it is not, Arthur. And so, I will muster courage to speak it," said the confiding girl with vivacity, after a short pause during which she hung fondly upon her lover's arm; and then suddenly changing her mood, she proceeded in a tone of deep and serious enthusiasm, "it is, that since that short, eventful and most solemn meeting, I have loved you, Arthur, with feelings that I did not know until then were mine. My busy fancy has followed you in all your wanderings—painted with stronger hues than nature gives to any real scene the difficulties and disasters that might cross your path—noted the seasons with a nervous acuteness of remark, from very faint-heartedness at the thought that they might blight your health or bring you some discomfort. I have pored over the accounts of battles, the march of armies, the tales of prisoners relating the secrets of their prisons; studied the plans of generals and statesmen, as the newspapers or common rumor brought them to my knowledge, with an interest that has made those around me say I was sadly changed. It was all because I had grown cowardly and feared even my own shadow. Oh, Arthur, I am not indeed what I was."
The solemnity, force and feeling with which Mildred gave utterance to these words, strangely contrasted with the light and gay tone in which she had commenced; but her thoughts had now fallen into a current that bore her forward into one of those bursts of excited emotion, which were characteristic of her temper, and which threw a peculiar energy and eloquence into her manner. Butler, struck by the rising warmth of her enunciation, and swayed in part by the painful reflections to which her topic gave rise, replied, in a state of feeling scarcely less solemn than her own—
"Ah, Mildred," and as he spoke, he parted her hair upon her pale forehead and kissed it, "dearest girl, the unknown time to come has no cup of suffering for me that I would not hold a cheap purchase for one moment like this. Even a year of painful absence past, and a still more solicitous one to come, may be gallantly and cheerfully borne when blessed with the fleeting interval of this night. To hear your faith, which though I never dwelt upon it but with a confidence that I have held it most profane to doubt, still, to hear it avowed from your own lips, now again and again, repeating what you have often breathed before, and in letter after letter, written down, it falls upon my heart, Mildred, like some good gift from heaven, specially sent to revive and quicken my resolution in all the toils and labors that yet await me. There must be good in store for such a heart as thine; and, trusting to this faith, I will look to the future with a buoyant temper."
"The future," said Mildred, as she lifted her eyes to the pale moon that now sheeted with its light her whole figure, as she and her lover strayed beyond the shade of the beech, "I almost shudder when I hear that word. We live but in the present; that, Arthur, is, at least, our own, poor as we are in almost all beside. That future is a perplexed and tangled riddle—a dreadful uncertainty, in the contemplation of which I grow superstitious. Such ill omens are about us! My father's inexorable will, so headstrong, so unconscious of the pain it gives me; his rooted, yes, his fatal aversion to you; my thraldom here, where, like a poor bird checked by a cord, I chafe myself by fluttering on the verge of my prison bounds; and then, the awful perils that continually impend over your head—all these are more than weak imaginings; they are the realities of my daily life, and give me, what I am almost ashamed to confess, a sad and boding spirit."