These twain often found themselves isolated now. Wherever they chose their seats every one seemed to think they needed room, and moved off,—treatment that Charley bore like the philosopher that he was. The fact is that, from being a man who seemed to have nothing to say, he became, about this time, one who could not find time to say all that he had on his mind. At this period of his life he used to lie awake in bed, for hours and hours, as he has since confessed to me [And to me. A.] [Wh-e-e-e-w! C. F.], running over in his mind the things that he had omitted to say to Alice the evening before, and resolving to say them all immediately after breakfast next morning. On this occasion a mountain torrent of words had risen in his soul during the hour’s absence of his charmer in the Argo. But he was not uttering them. Nor did it matter in the least, as they would have been as like thousands of others that he had been whispering and whispering into her rosy ear, as one drop of water of the supposed torrent was like another. The twain were rather silent, in fact. They were quietly watching the Don and Lucy.
One other pair of eyes took in every movement of the Don, another pair of ears lost never a word nor an inflection of his voice. (Mary was, it is true, engaged in an animated discussion with Mr. Poythress on the subject of Byron,—he denouncing the man, while she lauded the poet,—but then she was a woman.) “How changed he is!” sighed she. “A moment ago, pale as ashes; how bright and cheerful now! And Lucy! I think I should try not to look quite so happy, if I were you! Why not announce your engagement in words, as you are doing every moment by your manner?”
Alice, on the contrary, to Charley: “How well he is acting his part! He knows we are looking at him, and see the easy air of an old friend that he has assumed towards Lucy! Not assumed, either, for his bearing towards her has always been just that.”
“So I have always thought,” said Charley.
“Certainly; only that manner is rather more pronounced than usual. The merest glance would convince any one that he was no lover of Lucy’s.”
“‘He that hath bent him o’er the dead,
Ere the first day of death is fled,—
The first dark day,’” etc., etc.,
quoted Mary.
No voice that I have ever heard quite equalled Mary’s in sweetness, even in familiar talk. Soft and tender, it was yet singularly clear, though marked by a certain patrician absence of that exaggerated articulation so characteristic of other communities, where not the norma loquendi of gentle ancestors is the touchstone of speech, but the printed word, and the spelling-book, and the unlovely precision of the free school. But now that she was uttering a wail over her own crushed heart, and, in unison therewith, Byron’s passionate lament over the dead glories of the Greece of Thermopylæ and of Marathon, the tremulous fervor of her vibrating tones was touching beyond description. Two or three fair heads had clustered near hers to catch her low-breathed words; and when, turning to Mr. Poythress with a certain triumphant enthusiasm in her soulful eyes, she, with a slight but impassioned gesture, ended with the words, “’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more,” there was a sense of choking in more than one snowy throat.