“Eben,” said Abigail, “will you listen to me? I tell you, Jerome is behaving as well as any young man can. I know he is, from what Lucina has told me. He loves her, and he is proving it by giving her up. You know that he cannot marry her unless he drags her into poverty, and you know how much you have to help them with. You know, too, good as Jerome is, and worthy of praise for what he has done, that Lucina ought to do better than marry him.”
“He is a good boy, Abigail, and if she's got her heart set on him she shall have him.”
“You don't know that her heart is set on him, Eben. I think the best thing we can do is to send her down to Boston for a little visit—she may feel differently when she comes home.”
“I won't have her crossed, Abigail. Was she crying when you left her?”
“She will soon be quiet and go to sleep. I am going to make some toast for her supper. Eben, where are you going?” The Squire had set forth for the door in a determined rush.
“I am going to see that boy, and know what this work means,” he cried, in a loud voice of wrath and pity.
However, Abigail's vivacious persistency of common-sense usually overcame her husband's clumsy headlongs of affection. She carried the day at last, and the Squire subsided, though with growls of remonstrance, like a partially tamed animal.
“Have your way, and send her down to Boston, if you want to, Abigail,” said he; “but when she comes back she shall have whatever she wants, if I move heaven and earth to get it for her.”
So that day week Jerome, going one morning to his work, stood aside to let the stage-coach pass him, and had a glimpse of Lucina's fair face in the wave of a blue veil at the window. She bowed, but the stage dashed by in such a fury of dust that Jerome could scarcely discern the tenor of the salutation. He thought that she smiled, and not unhappily. “She is going away,” he told himself; “she will go to parties, and see other people, and forget me.” He tried to dash the bitterness of his heart at the thought, with the sweetness of unselfish love, but it was hard. He plodded on to his work, the young springiness gone from his back and limbs, his face sternly downcast.
As for Lucina, she was in reality leaving Upham not unhappily. She was young, and the sniff of change is to the young as the smell of powder to a war-horse. New fields present always wide ranges of triumphant pleasure to youth.