"What was it, Luise?" asked her father. "We must know what merry thought made you so joyful. It will be a dream worth knowing, and, therefore, worth telling."
"Not at present," interrupted his wife. "Let her get some more rest; and then, when she is thoroughly refreshed after such a tedious journey, she will make us all happy with realities as well as dreams."
"And are dreams never realities?" asked the girl, with a sigh.
"Child! child! if we're going to be philosophical, and all that, we shall never get you to sleep again. Don't talk any more, my Luise; but close your eyes, and see if you can't realize a dream; that will be the best answer to your question."
"I can't go to sleep again," she answered. "See, I'm quite awake, and it's no use trying. And with the sun so high too! No; you shall send me to bed an hour or two earlier to-night, and to-morrow morning will find me as brisk as a bee. I've so much to hear, and so much to tell, that to sleep again before dusk is out of the question."
So she arose; and they went all three and sat down in the little garden. Luise eyed eagerly every flower and every fruit-tree, and had something to say about every change since she had been there last. But ever and anon she would look earnestly into the faces of her parents—and never without something like a tear in her large lustrous eyes.
Of course, they questioned her upon this. And she, who had never concealed a thought or a wish from them, told them in her own frank, artless way, why she looked sorrowful when she first saw them, after a prolonged separation, and how it was that, in her sleep, thoughts had visited her which were messengers of peace and gladness—whose message it had saddened her to find, on waking, but airy and unreal.
At Seville she had been as happy as kindness and care could make one so far from and so fond of home. But a childish fancy, she said, had troubled her—childish she knew, and a thing to be ashamed of, but haunting her none the less—visiting her sleeping and waking hours; a feeling it was of dejection at the idea of her parents growing old, and of change and chance breaking up the wonted calm of her little household circle. That the march of Time should be so irresistible, that his flight could not be stayed or slackened by pope or kaiser, that his decrees should be so immutable, his destiny so inexorable, and that the youngest must soon cease to be young, and the middle-aged become old—or die! this was the thought that preyed on her very soul. She could not endure the conviction that her own father must one day walk with a less elastic step, and smile on her with eyes ever loving indeed, but more and more dimmed with age—and that her own mother must one day move to and fro with tottering gait, and speak with the tremulous accents of those old people who, it seemed to Luise, could never have been children at all. It was a weak, fantastic thought, this; but she could not master it, nor escape its presence.
And when she met them on the threshold of the beloved home—ah, the absentee's rapid glance saw a wrinkle on her father's cheek that was new to her, and it saw a clustering of gray hairs on her mother's brow, where all had been raven black when Luise departed for Seville. Poor Luise! The sorrows of her young heart were enlarged. Time had not been absent with the pensive absentee.
True, he had stolen no charm from her little playmates. Carlos was a brighter boy than ever; and as for that merry Zingara-like Isabel, and the yet merrier Manuel—they were not a whit changed, unless for the better, in look, and manner, and love. Still the too-sensitive Luise was hurt at the thought that they could not always be children—that Time was bent on effacing her earliest and dearest impressions, removing from her home that ideal of family relationship to which all her affections clung with passionate entreaty. Whatever the future might; have to reveal of enjoyment and endearment, the past could never be lived over again; the past could never be identified with things present and things to come; and it was to the past that her heart was betrothed—a past that had gone the way of all living, and left her as it were widowed and not to be comforted.