“I hope Clifton may do well next year,” went on Mrs Jacob; “you will miss him, and so shall we.”
“We must do as well as we can without him. In summer he will be home for good, I hope.”
“Yes, if he should conclude to settle down steadily to business. Time will show, and this winter we have Mr Maxwell. It depends some on Miss Martha Langden, I suppose, how long we shall have him in our house. You have heard all about that, I suppose?” said she, smiling significantly.
Elizabeth smiled too, but shook her head.
“I have heard the name,” said she.
“Well, you must not ask me about her. I only know that she gets a good many letters from Gershom about this time. It is not to be spoken of yet.”
She rose to go, and Elizabeth went with her to the door, and she laughed to herself as she followed her with her eye down the street. She had heard Miss Martha Langden’s name once. It was on the night when Mr Maxwell called on his way from the Hill-farm. He had said that he liked Miss Betsey, and that she reminded him of one of his best friends, Miss Martha Langden, one who had been his mother’s friend when he was a child.
Miss Elizabeth laughed again as she turned to go into the house, and she might have laughed all the same, if she had known that the frequent letters to Miss Martha Langden never went without a little note to some one very different from Miss Martha. But she did not know this till long after.
Clifton Holt went back to college again, and Elizabeth prepared for a quiet winter. She knew that, as in other winters, she would be held responsible for a certain amount of entertainment to the young people of the village in the way of gigantic sewing-circles, and no less gigantic evening parties. But these could not fall often to her turn, and they were not exciting affairs, even when the whole responsibility of them fell on herself, as was the case when her brother was away. So it was a very quiet winter to which she looked forward.
And because she did not dread the utter quiet, as she had done in former winters, and because she was able to dismiss from her thoughts, with very little consideration of the matter, a tempting invitation to pass a month or two in the city of Montreal, she fancied she was drawing near to that period in a woman’s life, when she is supposed to be becoming content with the existing order of things, when the dreams and hopes, and expectations vague and sweet, which make so large a part in girlish happiness, give place to graver and more earnest thoughts of life and duty, to a juster estimate of what life has to give, and an acquiescent acceptance of the lot which she has not chosen, but which has come to her in it. It is not very often that so desirable a state of mind and heart comes to girls of four-and-twenty. It certainly had not come to Elizabeth. However, it gave her pleasure—and a little pain as well—to think so, and it was a good while before she found out that she had made a mistake.