“Very,” quietly responded Clara.
“He is a very singular young man: he has grown so melancholy and reserved, so different from what he used to be. Don’t you think so, Clara?”
Clara did think her brother had altered. He looked so pale and seemed so sad. Something must be the matter with him.
Something was the matter with him undoubtedly. At home he was gloomy, silent, abstracted. He lived only in the light of the brown eyes at the cottage. He loved without owning to himself he loved. And to her! He would sooner have torn out his tongue than to have sullied her pure ear with a whisper of the maddening love that devoured his soul.
The cousins seemed to have changed characters. Edward chatted and laughed with his lively cousin Clara from morning to night. Frank was silent and thoughtful.
The gay party at the Hall wondered not a little at the repeated absences of Frank.
Edward declared his cousin had found some sweet simplicity of a being at whose shrine to worship.
“I would be willing to wager my happiness for a year to come, that you are in love, brother mine,” said Clara, one day when the inmates of the Hall were assembled in the library. “You are not the same brother Frank you were last autumn. I shall have to call you Francis, for you are not frank.”
Frank smiled, made some gay repartee—half acknowledged, in a laughing way, Clara was right.
The party grew more merry, and Francis, from being very low-spirited, became the merriest there. Sparkling words fell from his lips, and sparkling glances fell from his eyes, in uncontrolled profusion.