“Without intending it, she has taken the very best way to retain him,” she communed with herself. “She is a noble girl. Fred will rue this.”
Bravely as Hilda had borne the trial, try as she might to conceal her wounded feelings, Mrs. Warfield, apparently unobservant, knew as time passed on that the reaction was harder to bear than the first knowledge of Fred’s inconstancy.
Hilda had watched for his coming, the correspondence had been a stimulus in her uneventful life at the farmhouse, and when it ceased, in spite of her good sense and excellent judgment for one so young, she felt desolate and unsettled. She dreaded Fred’s next visit home. How could she meet him under these changed circumstances? What could she say to him, or he to her, under the piercing, satirical gaze of Mrs. Paul Warfield? And Mrs. Merryman—what would she think of it, she who was so glad to know that Hilda had such kind and loving friends in her new home?
It was a bitter trial to tell her, but Hilda’s conscience would not allow her to leave that faithful friend in ignorance of how matters stood, and in the postscript to her next letter she said: “Dear Aunt Grace, the engagement between Cousin Fred and myself is broken.”
That was all; she could not tell her now the cause, and was very sure that Mrs. Merryman would never ask.
Hilda was sincere in saying that she would not grieve. She read, she studied, practiced the most difficult of the pieces given her by Professor Ballini, and in other ways kept herself constantly employed; and Mrs. Warfield’s motherly heart yearned toward her as if she were indeed her own loved daughter.
After a time Fred’s letter set Hilda to analyzing the real state of her feelings toward him. She loved him because, like the others of his family, he had been so kind to her. He was one of the best of sons, one of the most affectionate of brothers. She doubted if any girl could have helped becoming attached to one so handsome and attractive, if placed in his companionship as she had been.
Yet she realized that the affection she had cherished for him was unlike that which she had thought a woman’s should be for the one who was to fill the place of protector and life-long companion; different, as she now discovered, from the affection she entertained for Mr. Courtney.
Yes, like a revelation it came to her in the quietude of her room that the feeling with which she regarded him was different from that felt for any other human being. She remembered his manly steadiness and strength of character; his protecting care of her and of everything feebler than himself; the repose and peace and contentment she always felt in his society. She remembered the last evening she passed at “My Lady’s Manor,” and tears filled her eyes as she thought of the loneliness that reigned in the beloved library, now that he was far away.
She took the miniature portrait of Mr. Courtney from its velvet case and looked long and earnestly at it.