"_Love!_" exclaimed Mrs. Wadsworth scornfully, "I should like to know
what love is."
"Father knows," said Dinah. "Have you read 'Elizabeth,' Tessa?"
"Yes."
"I'd _die_ before I'd act as she did, wouldn't you? I'd die before I'd
let any body know that I cared for him more than he cared for me,
wouldn't you?"
"It isn't so easy to die."
"Did Mr. Towne speak of Sue Greyson?" inquired Mrs. Wadsworth.
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing--much?"
"He must have said something. Couldn't you judge of his feelings towards
her?"
"I am not a detective."
"H'm," ejaculated Mrs. Wadsworth, glancing up at the uneasy lips, "if he
can't talk or sing, he can say something."
"Possibly."
Standing alone at one of the windows in her chamber, she watched the sun
go down the last night of the old year.
In her young indignation, she had called Ralph Towne some harsh names;
while under the fascination of his presence, she had thought that she
did not blame him for any thing; but standing alone with the happy,
false old year behind her, and the new, empty year opening its door into
nowhere, she cried, with a voiceless cry: "You are not true; you are not
sincere; you are shallow and selfish."
At this moment, watching the same sunset, for he had an appreciation of
pretty things, he was driving homeward almost as nerve-shaken as Tessa
herself; according to his measure, he was regretting that these two
trusting women were suffering because of his--he did not call it
selfishness--he had been merely thoughtless.
Tessa's heart could kindle and glow and burn itself out into white ashes
before his would feel the first tremor of heat; she had prided herself
upon being a student of human nature, but this man in his selfishness,
his slowness, his simplicity, had baffled her.
How could she be a student of human nature if she understood nothing but
truth?
She was in a bitter mood to-night, not sparing Ralph Towne as she would
not have spared herself. The crimson and gold faded! the gray shut down
over her world: "How alone I shall be to live in a year without him!"
"O, Tessa! Tessa!" cried Dinah, running up-stairs, "here's Gus, and he
has brought us something good and funny I know, for he's so provokingly
cool."
How could she think thoughts about the old year and the sunset with this
practical friend down-stairs and a mysterious package that must mean
books! She had expected to cry herself to sleep; instead she read
Dickens with Mr. Hammerton until the new year was upon them.
"Gus," she said severely, with the volumes of Dickens piled in her arms
up to her chin, "if I become matter-of-fact, practical, and commonplace
there will be no one in the world to thank but you. I had a poem at my
finger tips about the old year that would have forever shattered the
fame of Tennyson and Longfellow."
"As we have lost it, we'll be content with them," he said. "Drop your
books and let us read them."
Before the dawn she was dreaming and weeping in her sleep, for a voice
was repeating, not the voice in the school-house, nor the voice that had
read Longfellow, but the voice that had spoken the cold good-by at the
gate:
"The leaves are falling, falling,
Solemnly and slow;
Caw! Caw! the rooks are calling,
It is a sound of woe,
A sound of woe!"