Thus it is with us. We slide in a groove and seem happy, when suddenly a book we read, a story we hear, an experience we encounter, shakes us out of our content, and makes continuance in the old course a violation of the most demanding instincts of our nature.
In the full tide of this unrest, Paula went out for a solitary walk on the hills. Nature can soothe if she cannot satisfy. Then the day itself was one to make the soul glad and the heart rejoice. As the young girl trod the meadows, she wondered that she could be sad. Earth and air were so full of splendor. Nature seemed to be in league with the angels of light. September stood upon the earth like a goddess of might and glory. Every tint of green that variegated the mountainside, wooed the eye with suggestions of unfathomable beauty. A bough of scarlet flame lit here and there amid the verdure, served to illuminate the woods as for the passage of a king; and not Solomon in all his glory ever wore an aspect more sumptuous than the flowers that flecked the meadow and fringed the hardy roadside with imperial purple. A wind was blowing, a keen but kindly breeze, laden with sweetness and alert to awaken Aeolian airs from the boughs of whistling beech and alder. Even the low field grasses seemed to partake in the general cheer, and nodded to each other with a witching and irresistible abandon. Had a poet been at her side, or anyone capable of divining the hidden things of nature, what a commentary to all their united thoughts she would have found in the delicious tremble of the laughing leaves, in the restless music of the runaway brooks, in the lowly crickets with their single song, in the cloud-haunting birds with their trailing melodies, and in all the roll and rumble of earth’s commingled noises. Alluring as was the book of nature, she could not read it alone. She felt the lack of a loving hand to turn the page. “Is it that I am lonely!” she murmured.
The thought deepened her trouble. Coming down from the hillside, she entered a skirting of woods that ran along by the river. Here she had always found peace and some of her richest treasures of thought. Through this opaline archway she had walked with her fancies, like Saint Catherine with her lily. It was sacred to all that was sweet and deep and pure within her. “Lonely!” she whispered; “I will not be lonely. To some God gives years of happy companionship; to others but a day. Shall one complain because it has fallen to his portion to have the lesser share? I will remember my one day and be glad.”
“My one day!” She caught herself at the utterance and literally started at the suggestion it offered. There was but one person whom she had seen but for a day. Could she have been thinking of him?
With a flush deep as the autumn leaves she carried, she was hurrying on, when suddenly in the opening before her, a shadow fell, and a mellow voice exclaimed in her ear,
“Do I meet Miss Fairchild in her native woods?”
It was Clarence Ensign.
The surprise was very great and it took her a moment to steady herself. She had felt so assured that she should never see him or any other of her New York friends again. Had not Cicely written that he had gone West, soon after her own departure from New York. With a deepening of his voice Mr. Ensign repeated the question.
At once the day seemed to acquire all it had hitherto lacked. Looking up, she met his eye fixed admiringly upon her, and all that was merry, lightsome and gay within her, leaped at once to the surface. Ignoring his question with smiling abandon, she exclaimed,
“What shall be done to the man who delights in surprises and startles timid maidens without a cause?”
“He shall be held in captivity by the hand of his denouncer, until he has sued for pardon and obtained her generous forgiveness,” returned he, holding out his palm.
She barely touched it with her own. “I see that your repentance is sincere, so your pardon shall be speedy,” laughed she.
“Your discrimination is at fault, I never felt more impenitent in my life. I am a hardened wretch, Miss Fairchild, a hardened wretch! But you do not ask me from what corner of the earth I have come. You take me too much for granted; like the chirrup of a squirrel, let me say, or the whistle of a bullfinch. But perhaps you think I inhabit these woods?”
“No; but a day like this is so full of miracles, why should we be astonished at one more! I suppose you came on the train, but should not be surprised to hear you started, like Pluto, from the earth. Anything seems possible in such a sunshine.”
“You are right, and I have sprung from the earth. I have been buried five mortal months in a lawsuit out west, or else I should have been here before. I hope my delay has made me nonetheless welcome.”
He was holding back a branch as he spoke, and his eyes were on a level with hers. She felt caught as in a net, and struggled vainly to keep down her color. “No,” said she, “welcome is a guest’s due, whether he come early or late. I should be sorry to be lacking in the duties of a hostess, though my drawing-room is somewhat more spacious than cosy,” she continued, looking around on the fields into which they had emerged, “and my facilities for bespeaking you welcome greater than my power to make you comfortable.”
“Comfort is a satisfaction of the mind, rather than of the body. I am not uncomfortable, Miss Fairchild.” Then as he stooped to relieve her of half her burden of trailing leaves and flowers, he exclaimed in a
