Five minutes later, and Carice was alone by the river's bank, blushing to hear how persistently the little stream kept whispering and singing of what it had just seen and heard. The leaves, too, seemed to be softly talking it over among themselves; and a red bird and a gray one were gossiping merrily about it among the branches.
Still more plainly, Carice's face told the story, when she sought her parents. They saw at once that it was not the same face which had gone out from them an hour before. It had changed as an opening rosebud must have changed in the same time, under the balmy breathing of the warm south wind. Its merely girlish loveliness was over; playing about the mouth, and shining from the eyes, there was a bright and tender smile that seemed gushing from the very heart of awakening womanhood. Never had she seemed so lovely, never so radiant. Looking upon her, it was easy to divine the secret of angelic beauty. The heavenly existences are immortally beautiful because immortally happy.
"Did you engage yourself to him?" asked Mr. Bergan, almost sternly, when her brief tale was told.
"Of course not," answered Carice, opening wide her blue eyes at the unusual tone,—"not until you and mamma are consulted. Only, we know that we love each other."
At the same time, Dr. Remy stood smiling to himself, in his office,—a dark, ominous smile.
"I am sure of three months," said he. "And, in three months, tact and perseverance can accomplish a great deal."
At the same time, too, Astra rose suddenly from the chair, where Bergan had left her sitting, and began to pace up and down the room.
"I have been idle too long," she said to herself; "I have let myself dream till my world is peopled with shadows, and I cannot distinguish the false from the true. Work is what I want. Work will exorcise these phantoms, and make my brain clear and strong again."
She stopped and looked fixedly into vacancy, striving to recall a former conception that had been dazzled out of sight in the golden dawn of her love. In a moment, it rose again before her; a great, stalwart, straining figure,—a man struggling up out of the waves that had wellnigh worsted him, with a little child on his shoulders.
Quickly she improvised a kind of platform, and brought out her fertile box of clay. Nervously, she fastened her supports together; rapidly around them rose the soft, gray, plastic material in the rude, rough resemblance of a human form.