Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Yes, he was satisfied with himself and with her; and with himself
because of her. He had done well, and she was eminently the right kind
of wife for him, let conventional cavilers say what they would. He
never felt more reconciled to fortune and himself than he did to-day
when he rode by the side of the carriage wherein Leam and Fina sat,
and looked through the coming years to the time when he should have a
little Fina of his own with her mother Leam's dark eyes and her mother
Leam's devoted heart.
The day was perfect, so was the place. Both were all that the day and
place of young love should be. The view from the castle heights, with
the river below, the woods around and the moor beyond, was always
beautiful, but to-day, in the full flush of the early summer, it was
at its best. The golden sunshine, alternating with purple shadows, was
lying in broad tracts on meadow and moor, and lighting up the forest
trees so that the delicate tints and foliage of bough and branch came
out in photographic clearness; the river, where it caught the sun
like a belt of silver, where it was under the shadow like a band of
lapis-lazuli, ran like a vein of life through the scene, and its
music could be heard here where they stood; close at hand the old gray
ivy-covered ruins, with their stories and memories of bygone times,
seemed to add to the vivid fervor of the moment by the force
of contrast--that past so drear and old, the present so full of
passionate hope and love; while the shadows of things that had once
been real trooped among the ruins and flitted in and out the desert
places, chased by laughing girls and merry children, as life chases
death, youth drives out age, and the summer rises from the grave of
winter. It was a day, a scene, to remember for life, even by those to
whom it brought nothing special: how much more, then, by those to whom
it symbolized the fresh fruition of the summer of the heart, the glad
glory of newly-confessed love!
This was Leam's day. Edgar devoted himself publicly to her--so
publicly that people gathered into shady corners to discuss what
it meant, and to ask each other if the tie already binding the two
families was to be supplemented and strengthened by another? It looked
like it, they said, in whispers, for it was to be supposed that Major
Harrowby was an honorable man and a gentleman, and would not play with
a child like Leam.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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