Heriot's Choice: A Tale

by Rosa Nouchette Carey

'No one but my father ever calls me Ethel—to the world I am Miss Trelawny, even Olive and Chriss are ceremonious, and latterly Mr. Lambert has dropped the old familiar term; somehow it adds to one's feeling of loneliness.'

'Do you mean that you wish me to drop such ceremony?' returned Mildred, laughing a little nervously. 'Ethel! it is a quaint name, hardly musical, and with a suspicion of a lisp, but full of character; it suits you somehow.'

'Then you will use it!' exclaimed Ethel impulsively. 'We are strangers, and yet I have talked to you this afternoon as I have never done to any one before.'

'There you pay me a compliment.'

'You have such a motherly way with you, Mildred—Miss Lambert, I mean.'

Mildred blushed, 'Please do not correct yourself.'

'What! I may call you Mildred? how nice that will be; I shall feel as though you are some wise elder sister, you have got such tender old-fashioned ways, and yet they suit you somehow. I like you better, I think, because there seems nothing young about you.'

Ethel's speech gave Mildred a little pang—unselfish and free from vanity as her nature was, she was still only a woman, and regret for her passing youth shadowed her brightness for a moment. Until her mother's death she had never given it a thought. Why did Ethel's fresh beauty and glorious young vitality raise the faint wish, now heard for the first time, that she were more like the youthful and fairer Mildred of long ago? but even before Ethel had finished speaking, the unworthy thought was banished.

'I believe a wearing and long-continued trouble ages more than years; women have no right to grow sober before thirty, I know. Some lighter natures go haymaking between the tombs,' she went on quaintly, and as Ethel looked up astonished at the strange simile—'I have borrowed my metaphor from a homely circumstance, but as I sat working in the cool lobby yesterday they were making hay in the sunny churchyard, and somehow the idea seemed incongruous—the idea of gleaning sweetness and nourishment from decay. But does it not strike you we are becoming very philosophical—what are the little rush-bearers doing now I wonder?'

'After all, your human sympathies are less exclusive than mine,' returned her companion, regretfully. 'I like this cool retreat better than the crowded park; but we are not to be left any longer in peace,' she continued, with a slight access of colour, 'there are Dr. Heriot and Richard bearing down on us.' Mildred was not sorry to be disturbed, as she thought it was high time to look after Olive and Chriss, an intention that Dr. Heriot instantly negatived by placing himself at her side.