“Oh, love! how hard a fate is thine!
Obtained with trouble, and with pain preserv’d,
Never at rest.”
When they met the next day, something seemed to have come between them.
“What was it?” Ethel vainly asked herself. Something light as air; something so intangible that she could not give it a name.
A change had come upon Espy, but when questioned he insisted that nothing was wrong, sometimes asking, almost testily, why she should think there was; then, in sudden penitence for his ill-humor, he would be more devoted than ever for a time, but presently fall back into moody silence.
He was still dwelling upon the information his father had given him, still querying as to his affianced’s motives in concealing the facts from him, and alternating between anger and admiration as the one or the other seemed to him the more likely to have influenced her.
“Why will she not be open with me?” he asked himself a hundred times; “then there would be no trouble.”
And she was thinking the same in regard to him.
I am inclined to think that they were both in the right there and that perfect openness between married people and lovers would save a great deal of trouble, heartache, and estrangement.