“I wish that young man had fallen from his horse and broken his neck before ever he set eyes on Ellen Payne. Old women like us forget that young creatures die of a broken heart now and again, and if they could only die! The best friend I ever had, Roberta, had all the youth and love killed in her and went on living like a dry, little automaton of a woman, and is living yet. Instead of the things she might have had,—children and a husband and a home,—she has just her own dried-up body, which is like a little birch tree struck by lightning; and the thing she thinks of most in life is the noise that the sparrows make in her elm trees.”
But I could not fear that a fate like that awaited my Ellen, for my memory of her then is a lovely frail thing, with a hand forever held out to Prudentia and Flavilla.
Prudentia when crossed stopped, as was her custom, to pray. She prayed in season and out of season and for everything, and it was against her father’s principles to stop her.
“How stop a child communing with her Maker?” he would argue, to which Ellen would reply with spirit:—
“She’s only communing with her own selfishness when she says: ‘Oh! God, send the boys home so Ellen can tell me a story.’”
For several of Alec’s youngsters hung around the old Scudder place a great deal, and accompanied Ellen on her walks, as though Alec had left her, in those boys, a bit of his protecting spirit.
CHAPTER XXII
Various important things happened that winter. The first was a deep surprise to all of Alec’s friends. He became engaged to his landlady’s daughter in the town where he went to college.
“How can you?” I asked him, “caring for Ellen?”