Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with herself and to live up to all the things about “one love and only one love” that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and could not bring herself to do it.
“If I could only tell some one and ask what to do, but it seems disloyal. Roberta wouldn’t understand and some way I don’t want to worry my little mother. Sometimes I feel as if I did tell her without saying any words, when I sit beside her and hold her hand and feel afraid. The other night we sat alone in the dark. The smell of honeysuckle vines was so sweet that I shall never smell it again without thinking how soft her hand felt in the dark. She said: ‘When I was your age, I used often to want to tell my mother things and didn’t dare. My mother was more like your Aunt Sarah.’ My heart beat so when she said this that it seemed as if she could hear it, but I only pressed her hand and kissed it. Then she said to me: ‘You have seemed a little absent-minded lately, my darling child; have you anything on your mind, Ellen?’ And I said in a low voice, and blushing,—and I took my face off her hand for fear she would feel me blush against it,—‘What should I have?’”
As I read her cramped little handwriting a sudden wave of shame creeps over me as though I had gone back; I remember her so well; I was so on the outside; I loved her so truly. Meantime, as every day shortened the distance that separated them, a certain dread encompassed Ellen; she visualized their approach one to another in this way:—
“It was as if I was standing still and he was standing still, and that the space between us was being shortened by little jerks, and each jerk was as a day that makes us come nearer and nearer. I don’t want to see him—oh, I don’t want to see him. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him—perhaps nothing. He will look at me kindly—oh, kindly and critically,—and then I shall be afraid; afraid of hurting him—afraid of him.”
A little later she writes again:—
“If I go on feeling undecided as to what I shall do, something will snap inside my head. I can’t feel so uncertain. He wrote to me lately, ‘Ellen, my life would be utterly worthless without you.’ I cannot ruin any one’s life, and my life is pretty worthless, anyway, so I am going to stand by my first promise, which is the only brave thing to do. Now that I have decided that, I feel at peace. I loved him once and my love will come back.”
She adds touchingly, “I have two weeks before he comes”; but these two weeks of respite were denied her. I was going down to Ellen’s when I met Edward Graham on his way there also.
“I’ve come to surprise Ellen,” he said. So it happened that it was I who went to her with the words, “Edward Graham’s waiting for you downstairs,” and wondered at the sudden ebb of color from her face.