"THE HEARTBREAK OF TO-MORROW."
A few days after, as soon as Dr. James could make up his mind to do
so, he called on Miss Spelman, and found the house quite as forlorn
as he had expected, and his old friend very glad to receive sympathy.
She said she had heard from her niece that very day.
"It was an amusing, affectionate letter," said Miss Selina, "just
like her. Poor child! she will be easy now she is with her friend.
She was very much changed, doctor."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, she had grown so quiet and so strange--that is, she seemed to
me strange; she would sit so long without speaking a word; and then
she was much more affectionate--I mean more demonstrative--than when
she first came; but she seemed to have lost her good spirits."
"I thought she seemed much as usual whenever I saw her."
"Yes, she was gayer than ever when any one was here; but that was
only put on. Poor child! she felt Jessie's marriage, and that she was
so soon to be separated from the friend of her childhood."
Miss Spelman seemed to think the doctor needed consolation, and from
little remarks and insinuations, he imagined that she considered him
suffering from disappointment; he did not try to undeceive her, for
was it not true?
He found Martha Burney a great comfort; to her he sometimes talked
of Margaret, and from her he learned to understand things in her
character which had been puzzling to him before. And the more
he became convinced that Margaret had spoken the truth in saying
that she loved him, the more he wondered at and admired her for so
completely concealing it from him in their intercourse; and the
better he understood that her apparent levity and exaggerated spirits
were no doubt assumed in order to hide her deeper feelings. He
thought much of all these things, and wondered more; but he kept his
secret and hers, and only suspected sometimes that Miss Burney knew
more than any one else about the matter.
Dr. James was a disappointed man, and he made no effort to disguise
it from himself; but he was not a man to sit down in despair and
waste his life in regrets. So, recognizing the fact that he had
thrown away a great chance of happiness, and been wholly to blame
for it, he resolutely turned the energy of his thoughts into other
channels, and worked harder than ever. But Sealing became unutterably
wearisome to him; it was only by iron determination that he went
through with his daily round of duties, and as for society, he
confined himself exclusively to making the calls that he imposed on
himself, and going for relaxation to Father Barry and Miss Burney.
In the middle of August he left Richards in charge, and went for a
week to his mother and sisters in Maine.