Passed away like pleasant dreams!
For I loved then. I can smile now
At myself. ’Twas long ago,
Ere time’s hand had sprinkled snow
To cool love’s fever on my brow.
—Rosalie Osborne.
Everard Dawn’s words fell on his sister’s ears with a great shock, so deep was the anguish of his tone and the emotion of his face, his lips trembling under the rich brown beard, and his eyes gleaming under their heavy brows like shadowed surfaces of deep blue pools, while the pallor of his face was ghastly to behold.
She studied the agitated man in wonder and terror, for he was almost like a stranger to his sister, having never met her since he was a youth of sixteen, just entering college.
Since she had married in Virginia while on a visit from her home in the far South, her communications with her relatives had been almost broken off; the death of her father soon followed her marriage, and her only visit home had been to the death-bed of her step-mother when Everard was just entering college.
She was his only near relative, and she had urged the lonely boy to visit her often, but he had never accepted the invitation but once, having to work too hard at his chosen profession—the law—to find time, he said.