In her young indignation, she had called Ralph Towne some harsh names; while under the fascination of his presence, she had thought that she did not blame him for any thing; but standing alone with the happy, false old year behind her, and the new, empty year opening its door into nowhere, she cried, with a voiceless cry: “You are not true; you are not sincere; you are shallow and selfish.”
At this moment, watching the same sunset, for he had an appreciation of pretty things, he was driving homeward almost as nerve-shaken as Tessa herself; according to his measure, he was regretting that these two trusting women were suffering because of his—he did not call it selfishness—he had been merely thoughtless.
Tessa’s heart could kindle and glow and burn itself out into white ashes before his would feel the first tremor of heat; she had prided herself upon being a student of human nature, but this man in his selfishness, his slowness, his simplicity, had baffled her.
How could she be a student of human nature if she understood nothing but truth?
She was in a bitter mood to-night, not sparing Ralph Towne as she would not have spared herself. The crimson and gold faded! the gray shut down over her world: “How alone I shall be to live in a year without him!”
“O, Tessa! Tessa!” cried Dinah, running up-stairs, “here’s Gus, and he has brought us something good and funny I know, for he’s so provokingly cool.”
How could she think thoughts about the old year and the sunset with this practical friend down-stairs and a mysterious package that must mean books! She had expected to cry herself to sleep; instead she read Dickens with Mr. Hammerton until the new year was upon them.
“Gus,” she said severely, with the volumes of Dickens piled in her arms up to her chin, “if I become matter-of-fact, practical, and commonplace there will be no one in the world to thank but you. I had a poem at my finger tips about the old year that would have forever shattered the fame of Tennyson and Longfellow.”
“As we have lost it, we’ll be content with them,” he said. “Drop your books and let us read them.”
Before the dawn she was dreaming and weeping in her sleep, for a voice was repeating, not the voice in the school-house, nor the voice that had read Longfellow, but the voice that had spoken the cold good-by at the gate: