And fine it is on green hillside
Where hums the bonnie bee,
But rarer, fairer, finer far,
Is the Ingleside to me."
A light roseate film hid her from Roy's eyes. The Ingleside, where she now knelt! his and hers! did she really love it so well as not to pine for the haunts of her girlhood? And what had pressed that cry from her that was still echoing through his heart-chambers? the appeal that would have meant in a loving wife uncontrollable yearning for the sympathy of him who best knew her needs and her sorrows?
"O, Roy!" she had said, hands outstretched as if to fasten upon his for support in the deep waters. It imported more—a million times more, that childlike wail—to him than all she had afterward expressed of gratitude and esteem. In that hour, consecrate forever by what his musings brought forth, he resolved to woo and win a second time the only woman he had ever loved; who he had believed was lost to him for all time, chained as she was to his side, forced into a relation she abhorred by vows her dying father and he—impatient, ruthless lover!—had put into her mouth. He would be very wary, very patient, but love like his must conquer in the end. Doubts might oppose him in the broad light of day and common-sense, but he would not be turned aside. He did not underrate the difficulties that lay in the way of this novel wooing. Jessie was no longer the fresh-hearted, impetuous girl who had laid her hand confidingly in his (his palm thrilled now in the recollection!) as he sat by her in the oriel-window, the shadows of the tossing jessamine-bells— "joy-bells," he called them—cast upon her white dress and the carpet by the April sunshine; the dewiness and scents of the Spring morning in the air; the "light that was never on land and sea" glorifying the eyes uplifted to his.
Faulty, but frank, with a mind stored with crude riches, a heart whose capacity for love and Love's sacrifices even he had divined rather than discovered—she had been easily won, though not lightly sought. Now, the luxuriant womanliness, the growth of which he marked from day to day in her physique, had not kept pace with the chastened development of her inner nature. If he had said in that early stage of "Love's Young Dream"—"She is like no other girl I ever met!" she was now a veritable unique—a gem a monarch might be proud to set in his diadem.
For all that, he would win her! Should she arise from her lowly place by the ingle, and without a word of explanation or excuse for what was past, again give him her hand, saying merely, "I love you!" he would let all that had been enigmatical in their intercourse go from his remembrance at once and entirely; would trust her with his honor and affections, above all and through all that might stagger his faith in another. Was his a pitiful, cringing spirit? Was it a high or a mean type of human love that made him, possessing his tried soul in more abundant patience, say in the prospect of the tedious and cautious, it might be the arduous, approach to the goal of his desires, that must be his, if he would make success a certainty;—
"And they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her!"
CHAPTER XXIII.
Mrs. Orrin Wyllys had "run in very sociably" to chat for an hour with her dear cousin, Mrs. Fordham.