Mr. Leacraft had met Sally under circumstances the most provocative of admiration. In her own home; where the sincerity of hospitality and the urgency of an American’s deference to the best instincts of courtesy, did not altogether mitigate her coquetry and mirthful affectations, and even, by the faintest gloss of repression, made them the more delicious. The Englishman was bewitched, and his infatuation declared itself so plainly that Sally—whose heart was quite untouched by his distress—tried the resources of her ingenuity to avoid meeting him alone.
Leacraft, on the morrow of the day, whose close had so deeply inducted him into a study of American politics, expected to make a deferred visit to the Garretts at Baltimore, and he had quite firmly resolved that he would reveal his desperate extremity to Sally, and plead his best to show her how empty life would be to him without her, and that it would be shockingly obdurate in her to decline to regard him as the goal of her marital ambitions.
He felt some fear of her revolting gayety, and his fears were not assuaged by the remembrance of any particular occasion when her conduct towards him permitted him to indulge in hopes. Still the thing must be done. His unrest must be quieted. To know the worst was better than this feverish anxiety of doubt. And besides, with a prudence not altogether British, he thought he could endure repulse better now than later, and in the event of that evil alternative, he could cast about him for alleviating resources which might be more easily found now, than if he waited longer, and if he continued to expose himself to the perilous encounter of her eyes, and the tantalizing caresses of her wit.
When Leacraft returned to the hotel, he found a letter waiting for him, which he saw at once was from his friend, Ned Garrett. He tore it open and discovered, to his considerable discomfiture, that it postponed the event of his momentous proposal.
It read:
Dear Leacraft:
Aunt Sophia is very sick at Litchfield, Conn. Mother and Sally have gone on. Can you put off your visit until May, say the 28th? You will find it dull here without Sally and Mother. I shall go with them as far as New York. We all intend, if Aunt Sophy concludes to remain in this bright world a little longer, and the Dr. endorses her good intentions, to visit Gettysburg on Memorial Day (Decoration old style). The President will deliver a memorial oration. Come with us and see the great battlefield, which is a wonderful monument to the nation’s dead, a beautiful picture itself, and probably you will see and hear things worth remembering besides. Write to the house, and I will get your letter when I return in two weeks. But do come.
Yours sincerely,
Edward T. Garrett.
Leacraft put down the letter slowly. He was disappointed. A summons to the west, to the mines in Arizona, had reached him just the day before, and he must get out there before a week was over. He had thought to have finished this affair first, and to find in the tiresome trip distraction, if Sally was unfavorable to his appeal, or unexpected interest if he succeeded in winning her assent. Still he could readily accept the invitation. He would be back in May, and, perhaps after all the occasion might be more favorable. Sally softened into a little sympathetic humor by her visit to her sick aunt, and he strengthened by the encouraging reflexion of having successfully dissipated the little cloud of misunderstanding, or worse, at the mines, might produce conditions psychologically adequate to bring about his victory.
He stepped to the window. The view from it was always pleasing, at this moment in the descending shades of the closing day and with the vanishing lights hurrying westward beyond the Potomac, it possessed an ineffable loveliness. The great white spectre of the Washington monument, immaterialized and faintly roseate against the softly flaming skies, and brooding genius-like above the trees of the Reservation was always there, and that night it assumed the strangely deceptive but fascinating vagary of an exhalation, as if built up from the emanations of the earth, and the vapors of the air, remaining immobile in the still ether as a portent or a promise. The man’s face grew clouded as the fairy obelisk faded, and with the enveloping darkness became again discernible as a dull and stony pile.