Betrothal -- Fiction; Courtship -- Fiction; Middle West -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
As soon as she had closed the door on her father, leaving him in doubt
and confusion, she began a long letter to Marley. She described her trip
in detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that had befallen her;
she told him of the bridal couple she had seen board the train at Clyde,
and of the showers of rice that had been thrown by the laughing bridal
party, though she omitted the lone father of the bride standing apart on
the platform craning his head anxiously for another sight of his
daughter, and trying to smile. But she gave him a sense of the romance
that had stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on its lonely
point of rocks and the stone towers that made the wine-cellars on
Kelly's Island look like castles.
After supper Lavinia left her father to the pleasure of renewing
acquaintance with the lawyers who thronged the lobby, and stole down to
the rocks that marked the shelving shore of the island. She saw stately
schooners, with white sails spread, and she watched, until its black
banner of smoke was but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its
convoy of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm serene passing
of the life of the lakes soothed her, filled her with a thousand
fancies, and stirred her emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery
of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and then tears came to her
eyes. The waters were spread smoothly before her under the last
reflection of the sun, the twilight was coming across the lake; and as
the light followed the sun and the darkness crept behind, she looked
toward the south in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and thought
of her home and of her mother, of Connie and of Chad, and then she
thought of Glenn.
Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights moved swiftly along--one
of the big passenger steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and
Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of light new meanings; then
suddenly a fear seized her, a fear that was part of the ache in her
heart, and she ran into the hotel and up to her room. Then she took up
her letter again and poured out all her new sensations, her longings,
and her fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had finished, she began
to address the envelope; and she wrote on it, with pride:
"Mr. Glenn--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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