Retracing youthful ways
For him on whom the length’ning shadows fall!”
“A thoughtful rhyme!” Norman de Vere muttered, throwing it from him with an impatient sigh.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
It was one of the hardest tasks that Norman de Vere set himself to stay away two days from Orange Grove and the blue-eyed beauty who had beguiled the heart from his breast in such artless fashion.
He knew now, he owned it frankly to himself, that it was no brotherly love with which Thea West had inspired him. He who had thought his heart dead within his breast was in love now, ardently, romantically, as any boy of twenty, and the worst of it all was that he held his love as hopeless, deeming the disparity between them too great for him ever to win the girl’s heart.
Perhaps it was her absence that forced upon him a realization of the truth, perhaps the simple verses that somehow lingered in his mind, repeating themselves over and over in the solitude of the night:
“Poor heart, how vain thy dream!
As easy would it seem
In winter time dead summer to recall,