“Why, come to this corner, and take a letter of me every morning, all writ in the same handwriting, and letting any others for him go on to the house.” And on the postman went.
No sooner had he turned the corner behind her back than she heard her father meet and address the man. She had saved her letter by two minutes. Her father audibly went through precisely the same performance as she had just been guilty of herself.
This stealthy conduct of his was, to say the least, peculiar.
Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner life by her only parent, and the following forces alive within her; to determine a resultant:
First love acted upon by a deadly fear of separation from its object: inexperience, guiding onward a frantic wish to prevent the above-named issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of ultimate exoneration: indignation at parental inconsistency in first encouraging, then forbidding: a chilling sense of disobedience, overpowered by a conscientious inability to brook a breaking of plighted faith with a man who, in essentials, had remained unaltered from the beginning: a blessed hope that opposition would turn an erroneous judgement: a bright faith that things would mend thereby, and wind up well.
Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.
Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have been drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:
“If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have been made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?”
“Do you mean in the family by marriage?” he replied inattentively, and continuing to peel his egg.
The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the affirmative reply.