That she should have brought us together in the fulness and generosity of her heart, and that we should have taken advantage of the opportunity she afforded us of enjoying one another's company from morning until night, to plot and plan a speedy escape from her immediate guardianship, seemed to her a selfish and ungrateful return for so great a favour.
But she was too kind-hearted to wear her pleasant scowl very long. Mr. Nyle would talk of a time when "somebody" that he "had since had reason to know very well had committed just such an appalling offence, herself and," he argued, very suggestively, "unless that 'somebody' has had reason to regret and repent of her own rash ingratitude," he "could not see why she should interfere with other people, who were tempted to follow in her footsteps."
Zita and Louis laughed merrily at such allusions from their father, whose own eyes sparkled with the "light of other days," as he spoke them, and Cousin Bessie either bowed her head much lower than usual over her knitting as she heard them, or looked playfully up at her husband with a quick revival of the old time love in her pleasant, earnest features, and entreated him to "have sense, for mercy's sake and not have the children laughing at him."
In the first week of June, while the young summer sunshine was bright and pleasant, Arthur and I were married, Zita was my pretty bridesmaid and Louis our gallant groomsman; our only guests were the Rutherbys and Mr. Dalton.
Cousin Bessie gave us a cosy wedding breakfast, and it was amid riotous merry-making and boisterous good wishes for a long and happy future we drove away from the little gate, where some months before that we had begun the chapter whose joyful sequel was now in progress.
The rest is an old story, familiar to many homes and hearts, the story of that wedded happiness which is the outgrowth of two steady, abiding, enduring loves. I have been happier as Arthur Campbell's wife than I could ever have been as Ernest Dalton's, and I shall state why:
When we are young, we develop a tendency to exalt and idealize the common-place phases of life beyond all limits of reason or possibility. We flatter our buoyant expectations with the conviction that there is honey in the heart of every trifling flower we must gather by life's dusty roadside, and that it needs but the magic touch of our own hand to have it brought to the surface. This is a pleasant delusion, which, however, is susceptible of being rudely and roughly dispelled by an impartial experience as we grow older, when this exaggerated tendency creeps into our loves, and it is there it holds the fullest sway, and does the maddest mischief, the danger of a disenchanting awakening is still greater and more hazardous. For when we love in an abstract sense we exclusively, love in utter oblivion of the exactions of real life; we never stop to consider that that love which purposes to endure and strengthen with time must be coupled with a broad, impartial view of the stubborn circumstances, which are the facts of existence. A love that is all poetry and moonshine dies a sudden death in the face of practical dilemmas.
I have become convinced of this many a time, though my experience of wedded life is necessarily limited. Arthur and I have counted the grocer's bills, and made out the wash account, with the pleasantest smiles and most playful manner possible; and I have felt as I leaned upon his shoulder and scanned the items before us, that he was the dearest and best of husbands, whereas—Mr. Dalton, oh shades of poetry and song! imagine Ernest Dalton poring over a soapy wash account. I mention it, and Arthur joins me in the merry laugh the bare thought of it provokes.
Mr. Dalton, however, was always our good, kind friend, while he remained in our town. To the spirit of emigration that pervaded our cities some years later we owe his loss. He stole away without letting any one know of his definite purpose, and buried himself in the solitude of the North-West prairies.
For a time he was a punctual correspondent, but there came a breach and a pause, during which we learned of his serious illness, and subsequently of his death. To the end he had remembered us, and no one grieved for him more earnestly, more deeply than Arthur and I.