Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Love stories; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It had happened one Sabbath day in summer, when Evelina had not been
many years home from school, as she sat in the meeting-house in her
Sabbath array of rose-colored satin gown, and white bonnet trimmed
with a long white feather and a little wreath of feathery green, that
of a sudden she raised her head and turned her face, and her blue
eyes met this young man's full upon hers, with all his heart in them,
and it was for a second as if her own heart leaped to the surface,
and he saw it, although afterwards he scarce believed it to be true.
Then a pallor crept over Evelina's delicately brilliant face. She
turned it away, and her curls falling softly from under the green
wreath on her bonnet brim hid it. The young man's cheeks were a hot
red, and his heart beat loudly in his ears when he met her in the
doorway after the sermon was done. His eager, timorous eyes sought
her face, but she never looked his way. She laid her slim hand in its
cream-colored silk mitt on the Squire's arm; her satin gown rustled
softly as she passed before him, shrinking against the wall to give
her room, and a faint fragrance which seemed like the very breath of
the unknown delicacy and exclusiveness of life came to his bewildered
senses.
Many a time he cast furtive glances across the meeting-house at
Evelina, but she never looked his way again. If his timid boy-eyes
could have seen her cheek behind its veil of curls, he might have
discovered that the color came and went before his glances, although
it was strange how she could have been conscious of them; but he
never knew.
And he also never knew how, when he walked past the Squire's house of
a Sunday evening, dressed in his best, with his shoulders thrust
consciously back, and the windows in the westering sun looked full of
blank gold to his furtive eyes, Evelina was always peeping at him
from behind a shutter, and he never dared go in. His intuitions were
not like hers, and so nothing happened that might have, and he never
fairly knew what he knew. But that he never told, even to his wife
when he married; for his hot young blood grew weary and impatient
with this vain courtship, and he turned to one of his villagemates,
who met him fairly half way, and married her within a year.
On the Sunday when he and his bride first appeared in the
meeting-house Evelina went up the aisle behind her father in an array
of flowered brocade, stiff with threads of silver, so wonderful that
people all turned their heads to stare at her. She wore also a new
bonnet of rose-colored satin, and her curls were caught back a
little, and her face showed as clear and beautiful as an angel's.
The young bridegroom glanced at her once across the meeting-house,
then he looked at his bride in her gay wedding finery with a faithful
look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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