"Long years, long years have passed away,
And altered is thy brow;
And we who met so fondly once
Must meet as strangers now.
The friends of yore come 'round me still,
But talk no more of thee,
'Twere idle e'en to wish it now,
For what art thou to me?"
"Yet still thy name--thy blessed name!
My lonely bosom fills,
Like an echo that hath lost itself
Among the distant hills,
That still, with melancholy note,
Keeps faintly lingering on,
When the joyous sound that woke it first
Is gone--forever gone!"
"A neat conceit that last verse, and the music is a fair imitation
of a dying bugle-echo!" said Winston Aylett to himself, resuming the
writing he had suspended for a minute. "That girl should take to the
stage. If one did not know better, her eyes and singing together
would delude him into the idea that she had a heart. Honest Alfred
evidently believes that she has, and that the patient labor of love
will win it for himself. Bah!"
Frederic and Mabel retired noiselessly from their post of
observation, as "honest Alfred" made a motion to take in his the
hand lying prone and passive upon the finger-board. They exchanged a
smile, significant and tender, in withdrawing.
"We understand the signs of the times," whispered Frederic, at the
upper turn of their promenade. "Heaven bless all true lovers under
the sun!"
"Don't!" said Rosa, vehemently, snatching away her hand from her
suitor's hold. "Leave me alone! If you touch me again I shall
scream! I think you were made up without nerves, either in the heart
or in the brain--if you have any!"
Before the aghast Alfred rallied from the recoil occasioned by her
gesture and words, her feet were pattering over the oaken hall and
staircase in rapid retreat to her chamber.
"You are really happy, then?" queried Mabel. "Quite content?"
"Did I not tell you awhile ago that I was not satisfied?" returned
Chilton. "Two months since I should, in anticipation of this hour,
have declared that it would be fraught with unalloyed rapture. I was
happier yesterday than I am to-day. It is not merely that we must
part to-morrow, or that your brother's precautionary measures and
disapproval of what has passed between us have acted like a
shower-bath to the fervor of my newly born hopes. I am willing that
my life should be subjected to the utmost rigor of his researches,
and another month, at farthest, will reunite us. Nor do I believe in
presentiments. I am more inclined to attribute the uneasiness that
has hovered over me all the day to physical causes. We will call it
a mild splenetic case, induced by the sultry weather, and the very
slow on coming of the storm presaged by your dewless roses."