"I have been so tired and so frightened," murmured Dawn; and now she had
to let the tears come rolling down her cheeks, though she tried hard
enough to keep them back. But somehow she felt he would understand it
all, and she lay back and let him wipe them away with his large, cool
handkerchief that smelled of rose-leaves; and between the tears he laid
a kiss now and then that seemed like healing ointment to her sore heart,
so she no more tried to contend with her conscience as to what was right
for married women to do in such circumstances. She only knew she had
found some one who acted toward her as she remembered her dear mother
doing. The kisses seemed such as an angel’s might be, if an angel
stooped to kiss. So she ceased trying to understand, and just took the
comfort of it. Perhaps it had been sent to her to help her in her time
of need. Remember, she was very young, and had been facing a great
terror.
They presently trundled out of the woods into a little village, and the
comforting had to cease. Dawn sat up with rosy cheeks and bright eyes,
the tears all gone, and looked about her with interest. They talked in
low tones of the people they saw come and go on the platform, and
laughed at a couple of geese who were squawking and gabbling at the
train for coming so close to their nice mud-puddle by the track, putting
in a natural protest against the march of civilization.
But an old lady with many bandboxes and a carpet-bag was put into their
coach just before the train started on its way again, and there could be
no more quiet confidences. Dawn had thought she would presently ask a
few more questions about her husband, and why he had found it necessary
to take another train. Most of all, she wanted to know when and where
she was to meet him. But now there was no more opportunity to ask
questions.
At Albany, they waited for the stage-coach, and walked about exploring
the city, more absorbed in their own pleasant converse than in
sight-seeing, however.
"Do you know, they have never told me your name. I heard it first in the
ceremony this morning," said Charles, with a smile. "It is strange,
isn’t it? But we have had so little time, and before that I was away,
and they always wrote of you as ’Miss Van Rensselaer.’ I never asked
your name because I liked to think of you as I saw you first, all spring
blossoms, like some spirit of the air, and I thought a name might
destroy the vision."
The pink came softly into the girl’s cheek at his earnest words, and it
filled her heart with a glow of pleasure like to nothing she had ever
felt before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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