Herbert had not greeted his bride elect very lovingly, for to her untimely appearance he attributed Anna’s illness and decision. He could change the latter he knew, only give him the chance, but the former troubled him greatly. Anna might die, and then—Herbert Dunallen did not know what then, but bad as he was he would rather she should not die with all that sin against Adam unconfessed, and out in the beech woods where the night before he had planned with her their flight, and where after leaving Mildred he repaired, he laid his boyish head upon the summer grass and cried, partly as a child would cry for the bauble denied, partly as an honest man might mourn for the loved one whose life he had helped to shorten.
Regularly each morning the black pony from Castlewild was tied at the cottage gate, while its owner made inquiry for Anna. He had discernment enough to see that from the first his visits were unwelcome to Adam Floyd, who he believed knew the contents of the note written him by Anna. But in this last he was mistaken. All Adam knew certainly was gathered from Anna’s delirious ravings, which came at last to be understood by Mildred, who in spite of Mrs. Judge Harcourt’s entreaties or those of her tall, handsome son, George Harcourt, just home from Harvard, persisted in staying at the cottage and ministering to Anna. For a time the soft black eyes of sweet Mildred Atherton were heavy with unshed tears, while the sorrow of a wounded, deceived heart was visible upon her face; but at length her true womanly sense of right rose above it all, and waking as if from a dream she saw how utterly unworthy even of her childish love was the boy man, whose society she shunned, until, irritated by her manner, he one day demanded an explanation of her coolness.
“You know, Herbert,” and Milly’s clear, innocent eyes looked steadily into his. “You know far better than I, all that has passed between you and Anna Burroughs. To me and her lover, noble Adam Floyd, it is known only in part, but you understand the whole, and I am glad of this opportunity to tell you that you are free from an engagement which never should have been made, and of which you are weary. I did love you so much Herbert, even though I knew that you were wayward. I loved you, and prayed for you, too, every morning and every night. I shall do that yet, wherever you are, but henceforth we are friends, and nothing more. Seek forgiveness, first of God, and then of Adam Floyd, whom you thought to wrong by wresting from him the little ewe-lamb, which was his all.”
Herbert looked up quickly. Wholly unversed in Scripture, the ewe-lamb was Greek to him, but Mildred was too much in earnest for him to jest. She had never seemed so desirable as now, that he had lost her, and grasping her hand from which she was taking the engagement ring, he begged of her to wait, to consider, before she cast him off.
“I was mean with Anna, I know, and I meant to run away with her, but that is over now. Speak to me, Milly; I do not know you in this new character.”
Milly hardly knew herself, but with regard to Herbert she was firm, giving him no hope of ever recovering the love he had wantonly thrown away.
After that interview, the black pony stayed quietly in its stable at Castlewild, while Herbert shut himself up in his room, sometimes crying when he thought of Anna, sometimes swearing when he thought of Mildred, and ending every reverie with his pet words, “oh botheration.”
Each morning, however, a servant was sent to the cottage where, for weeks, Anna hovered between life and death, carefully tended by her mother and Mildred Atherton, and tenderly watched by Adam, who deported himself toward her as a fond parent would toward its erring but suffering child. There was no bitterness in Adam’s heart, nothing save love and pity for the white-faced girl, whom he held firmly in his arms, soothing her gently, while Mildred cut away the long, golden tresses, at which, in her wild moods, she clutched so angrily.
“Poor shorn lamb,” he whispered, while his tears, large and warm, dropped upon the wasted face he had not kissed since the night he and Mildred watched with her and heard so much of the sad story.
But for the help which cometh only from on high, Adam’s heart would have broken, those long bright September days, when everything seemed to mock his woe. It was so different from what he had hoped when he built castles of the Autumn time, when Anna would be with him. She was there, it is true; there in the room he had called ours, but was as surely lost to him, he said, as if the bright-hued flowers were blossoming above her grave. She did not love him, else she had never purposed to deceive him, and he looked drearily forward to the time when he must again take up his solitary life, uncheered by one hope in the future.