A life which bade her heart beat high,
And blazoned Duty's stainless shield,
And set a star in Honor's sky.
S. WEIR MITCHELL.
PLAYING WITH FIRE.
Apple-blossoms and the pale wild roses that grow in the shadow of woody lanes were things of which she always reminded you, she was so slight and so fair, with just a suggestion of bloom about her—the bloom of youth. Hardly beautiful, but then seventeen summers have a beauty of their own—a beauty of firm round curves and velvety color, whose absence a dozen years later works utter transformation. When Lilian should approach thirty, and the blush that shifted now with every word she spoke, almost with every thought, should have paled—when time and tears should perhaps have dimmed the soft eyes—then she might be, to those who love fleshly magnificence alone, of sufficiently commonplace appearance, but just now there was something about her so unique and so attractive that every one when she passed by turned to discover what it was. For the clear blue of her eye and the lofty purity of her brow seemed to tell of a spirit whose beauty far exceeded that of its temple, and the brightness of the glance and the sweetness of the smile warmed the heart in her behalf as regular outline and perfect contour are seldom known to do. Happiness, too, is a crowning charm to any woman, and Lilian was deeply and contentedly happy: a smile perpetually played in the little, half-guessed dimples at the corners of her mouth, and her wide clear eyes were full of peace. No; though years should rob Lilian of bloom, it was plain that they could but add fresh charms to her soul; and Lilian's lover must needs love her soul.
She was to be married in a couple of years—her mother would not hear of it at present—to one who had been her lover from her cradle, and who loved her with a tender and devoted passion, who thought her embodied loveliness, and who would have made any sacrifice, even to death, for her welfare. She had seemed to him from the hour when he first saw her—a blue-eyed, rosy child with an aureole of palest yellow hair—a being not made of clay—something remote and different as the angels are; and when he first discovered that he loved her he had felt momentarily as if he committed a sacrilege, and though he lost that sensation soon enough, she always, seemed to him a holy and perfect thing. The only cloud that crossed her sky now was sometimes when this passion of Sterling's oppressed her or constrained her, and made her feel that her love was less than his.
Sterling was in the first flush of manhood, some half dozen years her senior—a hazel-eyed, bright-haired Saxon, and a noble, upright fellow: he was as prosperous in his fortunes as he had a right to expect, for his father had established him in a good business, and with suitable thrift and care there was no reason why he should not succeed. His father was a man of such strict adherence to theory that he allowed the boy, as he still called him, only the same chance that he himself had had: he lent him his capital and exacted a rigid payment of the interest. "John shall share my fortune equally with Helen and his mother," Mr. Sterling used to say, "when he has shown me that he deserves it and can double it." And John, sure that any theory of his father's was as right as a law of the universe, was only anxious to keep the warm affection that he knew lay behind the stern principle.
He lived with Lilian's mother, whom he had persuaded, when she found it necessary to make exertion, to come to the city and rent a house there for himself and two or three of his friends. He meant to take the house off her hands as soon as he was able to afford so large an expenditure, and meantime he did all he could to help her render it attractive and homelike. If it was not yet all they wished, or all he intended it should be, he knew that they were young, and felt that they could wait; and he said as much to Lilian when he saw her stand on tiptoe before a picture or look longingly at a bit of bronze; conscious the while that there was an artistic and luxurious side to the child's nature that he did not gratify—with which, indeed, he had little sympathy—and evidence of which it often vexed him to observe, as if it were a barrier between them, when her rapt face revealed feelings unknown to him as she looked into the sunset; as she stood at the door on summer nights while bell-notes and flower-scents went by on the wind; as she listened to orchestral music which in his ears was a noisy snarl. But, for all that, he said to himself that this ideal intelligence, so to call it, of Lilian's, was something higher than his own rude senses; he had no wish to place her on a lower level; he must do away the barrier by surmounting it himself; and he used his leisure time to study pictures and music, to discover the entrance to this world of art whose atmosphere he fancied to be Lilian's native air; and already he began to be able to translate into ideas the strange and awful thrill he felt before some great white marble where genius and inspiration had wrought together, and to find the thread by which he might one day follow the vast windings of those symphonies which Lilian always grew so pale to hear. But he was a person of singular reserves, and Lilian learned nothing of such effort or accomplishment as yet. "You think I am so perfect!" she would say. "You have built up a great hollow idol around me, and it is like living in a vacuum. Don't you know it is very tiresome to be chained up to such a standard?" And John only adored her all the more for her candor, did not believe it, and hastened home from business the sooner.