“It is so wide, this great world vaulted o’er
By the blue sky clasping dark shore to shore,
It is too wide—it is too wide for me!
Would God that it were narrowed to a grave,
And I slept quiet, naught hid with me save
The love that was too great—too great for me.”
That brief letter from John Dinsmore created no end of excitement at Blackheath Hall. After an absence of five-and-twenty years the heir, whom she well remembered as a handsome, high-spirited, blue-eyed lad, was coming home at last.
All the old family servants were startled out of the lethargy into which they had fallen during the long years since a master had been at the old hall to rule them—most of them but barely recalled the owner, Mr. George Dinsmore, a bachelor, and the most extensive plantation owner in all Louisiana.
Mrs. Bryson, the housekeeper, well remembered a day when he called her to his study and said: “I am going away on a journey. I may return in a month, or it may be a year; perhaps even longer. During my absence, though it be long or short, I want everything at the old plantation to go on the same—you understand?”
The good woman courtesied, and answered: “Everything shall go on the same, sir, though you may be away weeks, months, or years.”