Leslie recovered from the stunning suddenness of her fate, and awoke fully to its brightness. To go down to Ayrshire and dwell there among hills and streams, and pure heather-scented air, like any shepherdess; to be the nearest and dearest to Hector Garret:—already the imaginative, warm-hearted girl began to raise him into a divinity.
Leslie was supremely content, she was gay and giddy even with present excitement; with the pretty bustle of being so important and so occupied—she whose whole time lately had been vacant and idle—so willing to admire her new possessions, so openly elated with their superiority, and not insensible to the fact that all these prominent obtrusive cares were but little superfluous notes of the great symphony upon which she had entered, and whose infinitely deeper, fuller, higher tones she would learn well, by-and-by.
Leslie Bower was the personification of joy, and no one meddled with her visions. Hector Garret was making his preparations at Otter; and when Leslie sang as she stitched, and ran lightly up and down, only the servants in the kitchen laid their heads together, and confided to each other that "never did they see so daffin' a bride; Miss Leslie should ken that a greetin' bride's a happy bride!" But no one told Leslie—no one taught her the tender meaning of the wise old proverb—no one warned her of the realities of life, so much sadder, so much holier, purer, more peaceful than any illusion. Her mother had relapsed into her ordinary calmness, rather wounding Leslie's perceptions when she allowed herself to think of it, for she did not read the lingering assiduity that was so intent it might have been employed upon her shroud. And there was no one else—no; Leslie was quite unaware that her gladness was ominous.
Only the shadow of a warning crossed Leslie's path of roses, and she disregarded it. Her confidence in Hector Garret and in life remained unbounded.
Leslie had gone to the best known of her early companions, her cup brimming over in the gracious privilege of begging Mary Elliot to be her bridesmaid. The Elliots had been kind to her, and had once taken her to their cheerful country-house; and now Mary was to witness the ceremony, and Hector Garret had said that she might, if she pleased, pay Leslie a long visit at Otter.
Mary Elliot was a little older, a little more experienced in womanly knowledge than Leslie.
"How strange it sounds that you should be married so soon, Leslie, from your old house, where we thought you buried. We believed that you must lead a single life, unless your father made a pet of one of his students: and then you must have waited until he left college."
"It is the reverse. I have no time to lose," nodded Leslie; "only Hector Garret is not old-looking. I don't believe that he has a grey hair in his head. He is a far handsomer man than Susan Cheyne's sister's husband."
"I know it; he was pointed out to me in the street. Is he very fond of you, Leslie?"
"I suppose—a little, or he would not have me."