"Then it will not do to encourage him in coming here," said Mr. Bergan, after a pause. "I could never give Carice to a drunkard, though he were fifty times as handsome and talented."
At this moment, Carice, awaking as from a dream, looked round for her parents. Seeing them on the piazza, she quickly rose, and came toward them, followed by Bergan. There was something in the action inexpressibly reassuring to the troubled spectators. The engrossing spell of the young man's conversation was so suddenly broken, when she missed her father and mother from her side! They looked at each other with a smile, and Mrs. Bergan playfully whispered,—
"I suspect that we are two fools!"
Nevertheless, enough of the effect of these few moments of parental anxiety remained, to fling a slight shadow over the party. Carice felt it first, in her quick sympathy with all her parents' moods; and Bergan caught it from her as speedily as if there were already some invisible bond between the two. Without knowing why, he very soon became aware that the atmosphere was again growing chill around him. He had been basking, not in a broad glory of summer, but only in a flicker of winter sunshine.
Under these circumstances, Mr. Bergan's announcement that it was time to set forth for the five o'clock service, was heard as a relief. Almost immediately, however, it was followed by an unreasoning pang of regret. It needed no soothsayer to tell him that moments like those just passed, were to be rare in his immediate experience of life.
Dusk was fast gathering in the corners and under the arches of the little church, when the service was over. Parting with his relatives at the door, Bergan went his solitary way to his lodgings, through the deepening twilight. He walked slowly, not that the road was so pleasant, but because the end had so little attraction. The walls and furniture of his room were still strangers to him;—no one corner would allure him with a more familiar charm than another, no particular chair would draw him irresistibly to its accustomed arms, no sweet, tangled crop of associations would fling their mingled light and shadow across the floor. It would all be dim, blank, lonely. And the foot falls but heavily on the path, the termination of which neither habit nor excites imagination!
Nevertheless, the slowest progress brings one quickly to the end, if the journey be short; and Bergan's lingering steps brought him to Mrs. Lyte's gate ere the dusk had deepened into total obscurity. Entering the wide hall, which extended through the whole depth of the house, he saw Mrs. Lyte seated at the farther end, in a doorway opening on the garden. Her little daughter Cathie was sobbing at her side, in what seemed an uncontrollable passion of grief and indignation. The child's protector and playmate, a half-superannuated old mastiff, named Nix, sat on his haunches at a little distance, watching the scene with sympathetic, intelligent eyes.
Cathie was already Bergan's fast friend. During yesterday's work of arrangement, she had at first hovered around him at a distance; then, yielding to the unconscious fascination of the young man's look and smile, as well as the irresistible attraction of the litter of books and papers, she had drawn nearer; later on, she had eagerly favored him with the somewhat questionable help of her small fingers, and the amusing chatter of her tireless tongue; and she had ended by giving him all her childish confidence, and a large share of her freakish affections.
Freakish—because Cathie was a sort of elf-child;—or it might be truer to say that, in her small compass, there were many elf-children; manifesting their several individualities through her changeable moods, and sending their various gleam through the almost weird splendor of her dark eyes. She could be wild and tender, playful and passionate, wise and simple, by turns; or in such quick and capricious succession that she seemed to be all at once. She took as many shapes, in her flittings about the house, as there were hours in the day;—now a teasing sprite, now a dancing fairy,—at this moment, a tender human child, melting into your arms with dewey kisses,—the next, a mocking elf, slipping from your grasp like quicksilver, and leaving you with a doubt if there could be anything human about her,—and anon, a fiery little demon, with enough of concentrated rage in her small frame to suffice for a giant.
It was in this latter phase that she was now exhibiting herself.