“How happy it must make you, Sylvia—coming home and meeting all your old friends! It must set you trembling with ecstasy—angels singing in the sky above you—little golden bells ringing all over you!”
Sylvia recognised these phrases. They were part of an effort she had made to describe the raptures of young love to her bosom friend, Harriet Atkinson. And so Harriet had passed them on to the town! And they had been cherished all these years.
She could not afford to recognise these illegitimate children of romance. “Mrs. Armistead,” she said, “I had no idea you had so much poetry in you!”
“I am simply improvising, my dear—upon the colour in your cheeks at present!”
There was no way save to be bold. “You couldn’t expect me not to be excited, Mrs. Armistead. You see, I had no idea he had come back from the West.”
“They say he left a wife there.” remarked the lady, innocently.
“Ah!” said Sylvia. “Then he will not be staying long, presumably.”
There was a pause; all at once Mrs. Armistead’s voice became gentle and sympathetic. “Sylvia,” she said, “don’t imagine that I fail to appreciate what is going on in your heart. I know a true romance when I see one. If only you could have known in those days what you know now, there might have been one beautiful love story that did not end as a tragedy.”
You would have thought the lady’s better self had suddenly been touched. But Sylvia knew her; too many times she had seen this huntress trying to lure a victim out of his refuge.
“Yes, Mrs. Armistead,” she said, gently. “But I have the consolation at least of being a martyr to science.”