"So long!" exclaimed the youth. He was only twenty, and the power to receive and parry comes later to men than to girls.
Even Peggy Neville felt a twinge of compunction at his throwing himself thus upon her mercy. "They have been pleasant days," she continued, "and therefore by all the laws of life should have seemed short."
"Why, so they have!" the boy rushed on,—"short as a flash of lightning in the passing, long as July sunlight in the thinking over; and now they are drawing to an end, somehow a darkness seems to fall around me. When I think of sailing down the river, away from the sight of the huddle of cottages, from the great cross in the centre of the village, from the glimpse of this little window that gives on the wharf, my heart sinks."
"I wonder why," said Peggy; but this time she did not look at him.
"May I tell you?"
"No, no—of course not," the girl hastened to say in a quick, business-like voice. "'Tis no affair of mine to pry into the feelings of all the young men who come to St. Mary's. Besides, here comes my aunt, and she will be more concerned to bring out wine and seed-cake for your entertainment than to hear of your regrets at parting. However," the tease went on wickedly, "if it would relieve your mind to tell her I will bring the subject before her."
Romney stood still, and looked at her without a word. She had hurt him beyond the power of speech. This first love of his, which he had been cherishing by day and brooding over by night for a whole week, seemed to him to overshadow the world, and that she, the lady of his dreams, should be the one to make light of it was past bearing.
"'All the young men who come to St. Mary's,'" he repeated to himself as he strode down the street. "So to her I am no more than one of the crowd of gallants who hang about the corners and cast eyes at the girls in the little church o' Sundays. Oh, but I will make her give me a serious thought yet! She shall know that it is not a ball she holds in her hands, to be tossed about and caught and thrown away, but a man's heart."
Then, as he recalled that dimpling face and those eyelashes sweeping the rich red cheek, he smiled in spite of himself, and fell to thinking of a little song his mother had sung to him years ago, a song of another capricious damsel, mightily like this provoking Peggy,—