“I hope that you may have reason to do so. May I tell my mother that you will call?”
“Yes—if you wish,” she said, doubtfully, buttoning a loose button on her glove. “Good afternoon, Dr. Towne.”
She passed on at a quickened pace, her cheeks glowing, her eyes alight. A stranger, meeting her, turned for a second look. “She has heard good news,” he said to himself.
Had she heard good news? She had seen the man that she had so foolishly and fondly believed Ralph Towne to be; she had learned that she could not create out of the longings of her own heart a man too noble and true for God to make out of His heart. Her ideal had not been too good to be true; just then it was enough for her to know that her ideal existed. Her heart could not break because she was disappointed in Ralph Towne, but it would have broken had she found that God did not care to make men good and true. And Ralph Towne would become good and true some day. And then she would be glad and not ashamed that she had trusted in him; she could not be glad and not ashamed yet. She did not love the man that could trifle with Sue or flirt with Nan Gerard. She had loved the ideal in her heart, and not the soul in his flesh. He could not understand that; he would call it a fancy, and say that she could make rhyme to it, but that she could not live the poem. Perhaps not; if she had loved him she might have lived a different poem; her living and loving, her doing and giving, would be a poem, anyway; she did not love Ralph Towne to-day, she was only afraid that she did. He could not understand the woman who would prefer Philip Towne’s saintliness; he was assured that his money would outweigh it with any maiden in Dunellen—with any maiden but Tessa Wadsworth; he was beginning to understand her. “She did not ask me to call,” he soliloquized. The stranger passing him also, gave him also a second glance, but he did not say to himself, “He has heard good news.” Was it good news that the woman that he had thoughtlessly deceived held herself aloof from him and above him?
“She loved me once,” he soliloquized, “and love with her must die a hard death.”
How hard a death even Tessa herself could not comprehend; she understood years afterward when she said: “I thought once that I never could be as glad as I had been sorrowful; but I learned that the power to be glad was infinitely greater than the power of being sorrowful.”
That evening her father called her to say: “The new professor is to preach Sunday evening before church service in the Park; you and I will go to hear him.”
XIII.—THE HEART OF LOVE.
The day lilies were in bloom, and that meant August; it meant also that her book was written, rewritten, and ready to be copied.
“Oh, that my poor little book were as perfect as you,” she sighed one morning as she arranged them with their broad, green leaves for the vases in parlor and sitting-room. “But God made you with His own fingers, and He made my book through my own fancies.”