Daisy Brooks; Or, A Perilous LoveLibbey, Laura Jean
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Daisy Brooks; Or, A Perilous Love
Libbey, Laura Jean
Adventure stories; Dime novels; Fiction; Love stories
The night-wind fanned her flushed cheeks and tossed her golden curls
against her wistful, tear-stained face. Noiselessly she crept up the
wide, graveled path that led to his home--the home which should have
been hers.
Was it fancy? She thought she heard Rex's voice crying out: "Daisy, my
darling!" How pitifully her heart thrilled! Dear Heaven! if it had
only been true. It was only the restless murmur of the waves sighing
among the orange-trees.
A light burned dimly in an upper window. Suddenly a shadow fell across
the pale, silken curtains. She knew but too well whose shadow it was;
the proud, graceful poise of the handsome head, and the line of the
dark curls waving over the broad brow, could belong to no one but Rex.
There was no one but the pitying moonlight out there to see how
passionately the poor little child-bride kissed the pale roses on
which that shadow had fallen, and how she broke it from the stem and
placed it close to her beating heart--that lonely, starved little
heart, chilled under the withering frost of neglect, when life, love
and happiness should have been just bursting into bloom for her.
"He said I had spoiled his life," she sighed, leaning her pale face
wearily against the dark-green ivy vines. "He must have meant I had
come between him and Pluma. Will he go back to her, now that he
believes me dead?"
One question alone puzzled her: Had Birdie mentioned her name, and
would he know it was she, whom every one believed lying so cold and
still in the bottomless pit? She could not tell.
"If I could but see Birdie for a moment," she thought, "and beseech
her to keep my secret!"
Birdie had said her brother was soon going away again.
"How could I bear it?" she asked herself, piteously.
It was not in human nature to see the young husband whom she loved so
well drifting so completely away from her and still remain silent. "I
will watch over him from afar; I will be his guardian angel; I must
remain as one dead to him forever," she told herself.
Afar off, over the dancing, moonlighted waters she saw a pleasure-boat
gliding swiftly over the rippling waves. She could hear their merry
laughter and gay, happy voices, and snatches of mirthful songs.
Suddenly the band struck up an old, familiar strain. Poor little Daisy
leaned her head against the iron railing of the porch and listened to
those cruel words--the piece that they played was "Love's Young
Dream."
Love's young dream! Ah! how cruelly hers had ended! She looked up at
the white, fleecy clouds above her, vaguely wondering why the love of
one person made the earth a very paradise, or a wilderness. As the
gay, joyous music floated up to her the words of the poet found echo
in her heart in a passionate appeal:
"No one could tell, for nobody knew,
Why love was made to gladden a few;
And hearts that would forever be true,
Go lone and starved the whole way through,"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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