As she bent over to kiss her mother for good-night, Mrs. Egerton whispered—
"That was a very cunning plan Wallace hit upon, dear, to evade your father's prohibition about letters. He gives us all so much pleasure that we do not think of objecting to it. Don't you think he must be a very designing sort of a man?"
"We don't know at all that it is Wallace," said Bessie, stoutly.
"We shall see what we shall see. Has he marked anything?"
"There are a few foolish verses marked; but I do not know who did it," replied Bessie.
"Well, leave the 'Book' with me; I would like to read them."
That was very hard. Bessie had only had time to glance hastily over some lines signed W. C., and speaking in woful strains of the pangs of absence and hope deferred, but breathing the most devoted constancy and love. These verses which, in her reckless confusion, she had stigmatized as foolish, she was longing to read over and over in the silence of her own room. But she would not, for the whole of Carolina, have expressed her wish. She quietly laid the "Book" on her mother's bed, placed the candles near her, and retired with her companions.
"Did you hear, my dear," said Mrs. Egerton to her husband, when they were left alone, "what Mr. Littleton, who has just returned from Philadelphia, says of Wallace Cuthbert—about the high estimation in which the professors of the university hold him? One of them told Mr. Littleton that he regarded Mr. Cuthbert as one of their most promising students, and that he bid fair to become one of the first physicians in the country."
"No, I have not heard it before; but I always had a good opinion of him. I refused to allow him to write to Bessie when he went away, three years ago, because they were both too young, I thought, to entangle themselves in any way. Bessie was hardly sixteen, and he but four or five years older. And he had not only his profession to acquire, but also to establish himself; for he has little else than his own talents to depend upon. Besides, I did not think Bessie cared much about him; she did not appear to."
"I think she always preferred him; but her preference was not a very decided one when he went away," said Mrs. Egerton. "Indeed, she was too young to know herself exactly whether she loved him or not; but it has happened that in each one of these monthly souvenirs that Mr. Cuthbert has been sending, there has been some pathetic story or touching little poem, by marking which he has contrived to indicate his own feelings, and not only preserve, but deepen Bessie's interest in him. I can perceive, I think, that her liking for him has grown stronger almost day by day. It is very clear that she cares for no one else. Here were George Musgrave and Robert Linn, two of the richest and finest young men about, whom Bessie dismissed without a moment's hesitation."