Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3Howells, William Dean
General
Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3
Howells, William Dean
Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Transatlantic voyages -- Fiction
They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and
now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the
garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every
point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible
knowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear delight of this
encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present
distinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to
be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see
her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her. Another
point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but
had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant
somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough
to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller. With
further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong
in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to
Mr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in
his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that
obscure passage of his life. He preferred to put the question by, and
perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to
the fact that they were now each other's forever.
They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at
least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At her
mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which
expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his
arm to the hands which she had clasped within it. "He has always
appreciated you," she said courageously, "and I know he will see it in
the right light."
She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability
finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy
accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see
General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.
"No, I will see him," she said, "I wish to see him first; he will expect
it of me. We had better go in, now," she added, but neither made any
motion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in the
other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in
the matter before they tried to fulfil it.
Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in going
to her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressure
under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her ways
and Burnamy's parted. She went into her own room, and softly opened the
door into her father's and listened.
"Well?" he said in a sort of challenging voice.
"Have you been asleep?" she asked.
"I've just blown out my light. What has kept you?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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