Mr. Yorke looked gravely at his niece. “I sometimes think,” he said, “with Pope, ‘that there is nothing needed to make all rational and disinterested people in the world of one religion, but that they should talk together every day.’ If people would ask what you believe, and listen to you, instead of telling you what you believe, and abusing you, much strife might be avoided.”
“I think that Dr. Martin’s motive in coming here was good,” Mrs. Yorke said. “He knows that we are going away, and wishes to part in peace.”
“Carl, have you settled what you are going to be?” Edith ventured to ask when he joined her afterward in the garden.
“No,” he answered, with hesitation. “Something depends. I am at the north pole, and all roads lead south. Meantime, I am not idle.”
She waited for him to continue,
but he said no more, and she felt chilled, and mortified at having questioned him. No one in the world was less curious concerning the private affairs of others than Edith, and she never asked a question, except from a feeling of tender interest. Therefore she considered herself repulsed.
“What are you studying now?” Carl asked, after a moment, the silence becoming awkward.
“I have almost given up books,” she replied quietly, and the hands with which she was weaving a morning-glory vine into its trellis were not quite steady.
Oh! if he would only question her, and insist on knowing everything. She was in deep waters, and she longed to tell him all, and ask the solution of her doubts. With a fine, unerring instinct which she felt, but did not understand, Edith could tolerate the thought of no other confidant. Yet a great barrier stood between them. She could go frankly to Dick, if she had anything to say to him, but Carl was different. She could tell him nothing, unless he asked her. Besides, he never told her anything. Now she thought of it, except these silent motions of sympathy, their intercourse had been very exterior. She knew nothing of his real life; and yet he, too, was at the point of choice in some things, and must have much to say to one he cared for and trusted. She waited a moment, then walked toward the house, and they separated rather coldly.
Edith had, indeed, dropped the study of physical science, but she had taken up another, and it perplexed her sorely. Within the last year she had been striving, with but little help, to learn something of the science of the heart. What was this love that had started up in her path,