Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/385



10th of December has come, and the hour of Paul's departure—a black and bitter day—and I am bidding him farewell; not in the old school-room, or by a warm fireside, but out here in the cold, raw winter's day, with the wind blowing wildly, dismally in our faces, with the dead leaves whirling about our feet like a host of restless spirits, with a dull, hard, cold sky above, and a desolate sweep of barren landscape stretching out before us. We are standing by the old stile where we first met, and our faces are not gay and warm as they were then, but pale and cold, his with the sorriness of a man who hates to part with the thing he loves best on earth, I with the restless misery that only a woman's heart knows who sees her treasure go forth into the world, and knows not if it will come safely back to her. It is such a little while that he purposes to be gone—only ten days—a mere nothing—why, therefore, do I feel such a dragging, heavy foreboding at my heart? why do I hold his hand in both mine, and look at him as though I were taking my last fill of gazing on him for years? Why do I kiss him again and again, with a passion that I never knew until to-day—as I could kiss him no more tenderly if he lay dying in my arms? Ah! Why, indeed! I have had a dream, but that is nothing; I have an instinct, but that is nothing—something