Was caught up into love and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm....’
“Yes,” continued Mildred after a little pause, and her eyes grew soft and tender, “a year ago I thought that love would never come, and I now sometimes tremble at the thought of what I came so near missing. I do not know how, once having learned the blessedness of this love, I could have courage to live if Ralph were taken and I left. Oh,” she added in a broken whisper, as for a moment she bowed her head in her hands, “if when death comes it will only mercifully take us both together.” Ah me! How little we both dreamed in what way that prayer was to be answered.
Presently she raised her head and continued, while her warm arms were about me again and my head lay pillowed on her shoulder. “Ralph is so kind, so good, so tender, so unselfish! Really, at first he seemed almost sorry when I told him my secret and he learned that he had married an heiress, as if he had lost the joy of working for me. How he thanked me for keeping the secret!
“And oh, Ruby, the thought of what he is makes me so ashamed of myself,” added Mildred humbly. “I have come to see how far beyond anything that I have done was his noble consecration of all his time and culture and ability to enrich the lives of those rough frontier men, while I have done nothing but sit in a velvet chair and sign cheques for money which I did not earn, and could never spend on myself.”
Then, after a pause: “Well, little sister,” she continued, “you do not know, and I have no words to tell you, of my happiness. I never dreamed of what I was losing in all those years before love came. I used to feel so strong and self-contained and independent, and now, it is strange enough, but I hardly know whether I have a mind of my own or not. If I have, I cannot tell what it is until I have asked Ralph;” and she laughed a happy laugh.
“Oh, Mildred, to think that I should ever live to hear you say that!” I exclaimed, laughing too. “And do you still want to vote and decline to obey? Is your haughty spirit quelled, and have”—
“Yes,” said Mildred, ambiguously. “Ralph is even more of a suffragist than I, and declares that this nation has no right to call itself a republic so long as one half of the people are disfranchised. And he says the most splendid thing he ever saw a woman do was my stopping that clergyman;” and she laughed again a ringing, girlish laugh.
After a while we began to talk about Mildred’s plans for the future.
“I want you to know everything, dear,” she said in her frank, confiding way. “We are going away for four years, perhaps longer, for I want to study many things, and I want to see Australia before I return—that is a country with a future.