"If he should become tired of me; if he should repent his hasty marriage; if he should cease to love me, what would become of me?" she thought, clasping her hands in an agony. "Oh, mon Dieu! let me die sooner than that. I know I am far beneath him—such lovely, accomplished ladies as my darling might have married—but ah, not one of them all could ever love him better than poor Norine!"
She hid her fears; the tears she shed over their silence and unforgiveness at home were tears shed in solitude and darkness, where they might not offend or reproach him. She tried every simple little art to be beautiful and attractive in his sight. Her smiling face was the last thing he saw, let him quit her ever so often—her smiling face looked brightly and sweetly up at him let those absences be ever so prolonged. And they were growing more frequent and more prolonged every day. He took her nowhere—his own evenings, without exception now, were spent in Boston, the smallest of the small hours his universal hours for coming home. And not always too steady of foot or too fluent of speech at these comings, for this captivating young man was fonder of the rattle of the dice-box, the shuffling of the pack, and the "passing of the rosy" than was at all good for him.
"Laurence," Norine's bright voice called, "you know everything. Come and tell me what is this botanical specimen I have found growing here in the cleft of the rocks."
She held up a spray of blue blossom. Laurence looked at it languidly.
"I know everything, I admit, but I don't know that. If you had married old Gilbert now, my darling, your thirst for information might have been quenched. There isn't anything, from the laws of the nations down to the name of every weed that grows, he hasn't at his learned legal finger ends. Oh, Lord, Norry, what a long day this has been—fifty-eight hours if one."
He casts himself on the sands at her feet, pulls his hat over his eyes, and yawns long and loudly. Her happy face clouds, the dark, lovely eyes look at him wistfully.
"It is dull for you, dear," she says, tenderly, a little tremor in the soft, sweet tones; "for me the days seem all too short—I am so happy, I suppose." He glances up at her, struggling feebly with a whole mouthful of gapes.
"You are happy, then, Norry, are you? Almost as happy as when at home; almost as happy as if you had married that ornament of society, Richard Gilbert, instead of the scapegrace and outlaw, Laurence Thorndyke?"
She clasped her hands, always her habit when moved.
"So happy!" she said, under her breath; "so perfectly, utterly happy. How could I ever have thought of marrying any one but you, Laurence—you whom I loved from the very very first?"