He draws a long, deep breath, like one who, having been long oppressed, suddenly feels a weight removed. Then he throws back his shoulders and walks with a proudly uplifted head and elastic step from the room.
CHAPTER I.
AN ACT OF HEROISM.
A long and heavily laden passenger-train—the 3 o’clock limited express from Boston to New York—and composed chiefly of parlor-cars, was almost ready to pull out of the station. The engineer and fireman were in their places, while the porters, standing beside their steps, were awaiting the last signal from the gong.
Midway of the train, and sitting at the open window of her section, a young girl of perhaps fourteen or fifteen years, was sitting. She was a veritable pink-and-white beauty, with golden hair lying in soft, fluffy curls about her forehead, beneath which a pair of mischievous blue eyes—a saucy light gleaming in their azure depths—looked out and down upon the handsome face of a tall, well-formed youth, with an unmistakable air of high breeding about him, who was standing on the platform outside with a somewhat lugubrious expression on his countenance.
He was evidently about eighteen years of age, and everything about him indicated a scion of a wealthy aristocrat.
“Remember, Mollie,” he was saying, “you have promised to write me every week, and I shall expect you to tell me everything you hear, see, and do—yes, and think. I don’t know how I’m going to stand it to have you gone, for nobody knows how long, with the ocean between us and all our good times at an end.”
“Nonsense, Phil, you silly boy! You are going to be at Harvard, and, absorbed in your studies and your various clubs and societies, you will soon forget all about those ‘old times,’ and be bored beyond expression if I should take you at your word and inflict a letter, filled with foolish, girlish gossip, upon you every week,” the girl laughingly retorted.
Nevertheless, her saucy eyes grew a trifle sad while she was speaking, and a deeper pink glowed upon her cheeks.
“No, it is not ‘nonsense,’ and I shall never ‘forget,’ as you will prove to your satisfaction, if you will only do your duty,” the young man earnestly returned. “So send on your letters, and mind, Mollie, you don’t let any one steal your heart away from me, for you know you are to marry me just as soon as I am through college.”