Not Like Other Girls

by Rosa Nouchette Carey

Perhaps, after all, that was why he came in so often, because he was so sorry for them, and wished to help them, as he said. A clergyman has more privileges than other men: perhaps she was wrong to suspect him. He might not wish his sister to visit them, except in a purely business-like way; but with him it was different. Most likely he had tea with Mrs. Trimmings sometimes, just to show he was not proud; he might even sit and chat with Mrs. Squails, and not feel compromised in the least. Oh, yes! how stupid she was to think he admired Nan, because she had intercepted a certain glance! That was her mania, thinking every one must be after Nan. Things were different now.

Of course he would be their only link with civilized society,—the only cultivated mind with which they could hold converse; and here Phillis ceased to curl her lip, and her gray eyes 185 took a sombre shade, and she sighed so audibly that Archie broke off an interesting discussion on last Commemoration, and looked at her in unfeigned surprise.

“Oh, yes! we were there,” returned Nan, innocently, who loved to talk of those dear old times; “and we were at the fête at Oriel, and at the concert at Magdalen also. Ah! do you remember, Dulce?” And then she faltered a little, and flushed,—not because Mr. Drummond was looking at her so intently but at certain thoughts that began to intrude themselves, which entwined themselves with the moonlighted cloisters.

“I was to have been there too, only at the last moment I was prevented,” replied Archie; but his tone was inexplicable to the girl, it was at once so regretful and awe-struck. Good heavens! if he had met them, and been introduced to them in proper form! They had mentioned a Mr. Hamilton: well, Hamilton had been a pupil of his; he had coached him during a term. “You know Hamilton?” he had said, staring at her; and then he wondered what Hamilton would say if he came down to stay with him next vacation.

These reflections made him rather absent; and even when he took his leave, which was not until the falling dews and the glimmer of a late dusk drove Mrs. Challoner into the house, these thoughts still pursued him. Nothing else seemed to have taken so strong a hold on him as this.

“Good heavens!” he kept repeating to himself, “to think that the merest chance—just the incidental business of a friend—prevented me from occupying my old rooms during Commemoration! to think I might have met them in company with Hamilton and the other fellows!”

The sudden sense of disappointment, of something lost and irremediable in his life, of wasted opportunities, of denied pleasure, came over the young man’s mind. He could not have danced with Nan at the University ball, it is true: clergymen, according to his creed, must not dance. But there was the fête at Oriel, and the Magdalen concert, and the Long Walk in the Christchurch meadows, and doubtless other opportunities.

He never asked himself if these girls would have interested him so much if he had met them first in ordinary society: from the very first moment they had attracted him strangely. Had he only known them a fortnight? Good heavens! it seemed months, years, a lifetime! These revolutions of mind are not to be measured by time. It had come to this that the late fellow of Oriel, so aristocratic in his tastes, so temperate in his likings, had entered certain devious paths, where hidden pitfalls and thorny enclosures warn the unwary traveller of unknown dangers, and in which he was walking, not blindfold, but by strongest will and intent, led by impulse like a mere boy, and not daring to raise his eyes to the future. “And what Grace would have said!” And for the first time in his life Archie felt that in this case he could not ask Grace’s advice. He was 186 loath to turn in at his own gate; but Mattie was standing there watching for him. She ran out into the road to meet him, and then he could see there were letters in her hand.

“Oh, dear, Archie, I thought you were never coming home!” she exclaimed. “And I have such news to tell you! There is a letter for you from Grace, and mother has written to me; and there is a note from Isabel inside, and she is engaged—really and truly engaged—to Mr. Ellis Burton; and the wedding is to be in six weeks, and you and I are to go down to it, and—oh, dear––” Here Mattie broke down, and began to sob with excitement and pleasure and the longing for sympathy.

“Well, well, there is nothing to cry about!” returned Archie, roughly; and then his manner changed and softened in spite of himself; for after all, Isabel was his sister, and this was the first wedding in the family, and he could not hear such a piece of news unmoved. “Let me hear all about it,” he said, by and by; and then he took poor hysterical little Mattie into the house, and gave her some wine, and was very kind to her, and listened to his mother’s letter and Isabel’s gushing effusion without a single sneer. “Poor little Belle; she does seem very happy!” he said, quite affectionately, as he turned up the lamp still more, and began Grace’s letter.