"It ought and does. I am relieved to hear all this! very much pleased!" said Mr. Hunt, enthusiastically. "I have all confidence in Nathan Benson's judgment and integrity. I hope his nephew is as sterling a man. Thus far," he continued, playfully, "I have learned but one thing to his discredit, and that is, having seen this one of my daughters, he could afterwards fall in love with the other."
"I am not beautiful and good like Lucy, father."
"Very dear and lovely in my eyes, my child! Again forgive me for having worried your poor head with my inquiries. I was unwilling to decide a matter where Lucy's happiness was involved, without obtaining your evidence in the case. A last good-night! and God bless you, my dearest, best daughter!"
Sarah held up her face for his kiss without attempting to speak. This burning ordeal, the harder to endure because unexpected, was over. She was as weak as a child with conflicting passions when she arose and endeavored to undress. After stooping several times to regain breath and strength, she was at last ready to creep into bed, there to lie until morning broke, sleepless and suffering.
Her sharpened senses could discern her father's and mother's voices in the sitting-room, in confidential talk—interrupted, by-and-by, by Lucy's pure, mellow tones, apparently conveying some message to the former. Its import was easily surmised, for his step was then heard in the hall and on the stairs, until he reached the parlor where Philip awaited him. Their conference did not occupy more than twenty minutes, which time Lucy spent with her mother—how gayly, Sarah could judge by the laugh that, again and again, reached her room. Mr. Hunt returned, spoke a few sentences in his calm, grave way, and the closing door was followed by a flutter of silk and fall of gliding footsteps, as Lucy went down to her now formally and fully betrothed husband.
"Husband!" Yes! it was even so! Henceforth the lives of the pair were to be as one in interest, in aims, in affection. Ere long, they would have no separate outward existence in the eyes of the world. Was his chosen love, then, in a truer and higher sense, his other self—the being sought so long and carefully? The pretty fiancee would have stretched her cerulean orbs in amazed wonder at the ridiculous doubt, and asked, in her matter-of-fact way, how the thing could have happened, if it had not been intended? Philip's indignant affirmative would have gained fervor from his exultant consciousness of possession—so novel and sweet. But one above stairs, taught sagacity by the depth of her grief, looked further into the future than did they, and read there a different reply.
She heard the clang of the front door as it shut after the young lover, and in the still midnight, the echoes, faint and fainter, of his retreating footsteps—the same free, light tread she used to hearken for in porch and hall of that riverside farm house; and as the remembrance came over her she turned her face to the wall, murmuring passionately: "Oh! if I could never, never see him again!"
This feeling, whether born of cowardice or desperation, was the ruling one, when her mother looked in upon her before breakfast, and expressed her concern at finding her still in bed.
"I am not well enough to get up, mother," Sarah said sincerely, and Mrs. Hunt, reading in the parched lips and bloodshot eyes proof of the justice of the fears her husband had expressed to her the preceding evening, resolved that the doctor should see her "before she was two hours older."
In vain Sarah entreated that this should not be done, and prophesied her recovery without his assistance. For once her parents were a unit in sentiment and action, and the physician was summoned to his second patient.