And Norah goes obediently.
Then she incloses the perfumed pink epistle in the dainty envelope bearing the monogram of the newly made wife, and laying it aside rests her head upon her hands, watching with dusk pained eyes the shadows that darken over the sky and over her golden head as she sits alone, her heart on fire with that keenest refinement of human suffering—"remembering happier things." All her brightness, all her love lies behind her in the past, in the green land of memory. The present holds no joy, the future no promise. The dimness of uncertainty, of doubt, of suspense, lies darkly on the present hour, the hopelessness of hope clouds the future. Heaven seems so far away as she lifts her mournful gaze to the purple, mysterious twilight sky, life seems so long as she remembers how young she is, and what possibilities for length of days lie before her. What wonder that her brave, long-tried strength fails her a little, that her sensitive spirit quails momentarily, and the angel of the human breast, hope,
"Comes back with worn and wounded wing,
To die upon the heart she could not cheer."
[CHAPTER XXII.]
ON TIPTOE FOR A FLIGHT.
"If it be a sin to love thee,
Then my soul is deeply dyed
With a stain more dark than crimson,
That hath all the world defied;
For it holds thine image nearer
Than all else this earth hath given,
And regarded thee as dearer
Almost than its hopes of heaven!"
A period of three months goes by after Lulu's marriage, swiftly to those who are gone, slowly to those who remain. Mrs. Clendenon, in quiet household employments, in prayerful study of her Bible, fills up the aching void of her daughter's absence. Grace, in pursuance of the charge Lulu has left her, finds much of her leisure employed in scenes and undertakings that gently divert her mind from her own troubles to those of others. Under it all, the wound that time has only seared lies hidden, as near as she can hide it, from the probing of careless fingers.
Captain Clendenon shuts himself up in his dusty law office with his red-tape documents and law books. Of late he has covered himself with glory in the winning of a difficult suit at law, and Norfolk is loud in praise of the one-armed soldier, the maimed hero who has grown into such an erudite lawyer. He takes the adulation very quietly. "The time has passed when he sighed for praise." A shadow lies darkly on his life—the shadow of Grace Winans' unhappiness. In that strong, pure heart of his, no thought of himself, no selfish wish for his own happiness ever intrudes. Had peace folded his white wings over her fair head she would long ago have become to his high, honorable heart, a thing apart from his life, as something fair and lovely that was dead; and with her safe in the shelter of another man's love he would have tutored his heart to forget her. As it was, when he looked on the fair face that was to him but a reflex of the saintly soul within, his whole soul yearned over her; his love, which had in it more of heaven than earth, infolded her within the sphere of its own idolizing influence. She became to him, not the fair, fascinating, but sometimes faulty mortal woman the world saw in her, but rather a goddess, a creature most like
"That ethereal flower—
No more a fabled wonder—
That builds in air its azure bower,
And floats the starlight under.
Too pure to touch our sinful earth,
Too human yet for heaven,
Half-way it has its glorious birth,
With no root to be riven."