Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/741

Rh didn't say anything. I wanted to ask her why she didn't join me in the way she used to, but I was afraid it wouldn't be so pleasant if we talked. I thought when the bird stopped she would go, but she didn't right at once. I don't believe we said six words. There didn't seem to be anything we wanted to talk about, but I have thought since of several things I should like to say."

After that he often noted having seen or met Clarissa, but, until two years later, they never came so near to their old footing as in that silent meeting in the woods. The next record of any moment was made in his eighteenth year. It had been decided that Clarissa was to go abroad to study music, and the day of her departure was close. He often had glimpses of her as he came or went to her father's study; he never stopped to talk with her; but now she stopped him one day to ask if he were not coming to see her, instead of her father, once before she left, to bid her good-by.

"And of course I must go," he wrote that night in his journal, "but I hate to. I don't know what we'll talk about, I'm sure."

When he finally called on her, feeling more shy and awkward than he had supposed it possible to feel in the professor's house, there was little necessity to talk, for Clarissa sang to him, selecting difficult song after song that he had never heard. He did not know music well enough to turn the pages for her, but whenever she paused, he said with all the unction he could summon:

"That was very beautiful. I enjoyed that very much."

Finally she swung round on the piano-stool. "Why do you say that?" she asked. "To-morrow you will not know what I have sung."

"They—they are all so unfamiliar," he stammered, blushing hotly.

"Then listen," she said, and turning back to the piano, she sang "Johnny Sands" in a constrained, unsteady voice.

His record of it read oddly across a space of nearly thirty years. "I wish I knew what she was thinking about," he wrote. "I suppose she was homesick at the idea of going away so far. Her voice shook as if she were about to cry, but when she was done she looked over her shoulder at me and laughed, so I saw she didn't want me to notice how she felt. A girl isn't self-controlled like a man. She can't help showing out her emotions. I was unhappy myself, but I didn't show it. I always am unhappy when I think how much better friends we were as children than we are now. I got away as soon as I could. It would have been better if I hadn't gone at all. She will go off and forget that I ever existed. I suppose she has already forgotten what we promised each other once, but I thought of it every instant while she sang 'Johnny Sands,' and if she hadn't laughed— Oh, I'm a fool, that's all. I must just make up my mind to remember, while she forgets, and keep the hurt of it to myself all my life."

Yes, that was strange reading after thirty years; for his remembering had taken the form of marrying another girl long before Clarissa came home from abroad. "Mabel is the most beautiful, the most fascinating woman I have ever seen," he wrote in his diary before his marriage. "How it happens that she whom every one adores should have listened to me I do not know. But I could not have lived without her, and perhaps she felt that. Perhaps there was something of divine pity in her yielding—" And that was strange reading, too, in the light of middle age. "Divine pity—" his lips curved a little as he read, and suddenly his eyes filled with tears. With what folly, with what blind trust he had chosen, and how soon afterwards he had begun to suffer and rebel in spirit!

"If Mabel could only understand," he found that he had written again and again during the early years of his marriage ; and once he added: "I am distracted, desperate. My own income is limited, my salary from the college very small and not likely to increase soon, yet from the first Mabel has refused to listen to me as to the spending of her little fortune,—has refused to understand that when it is gone I shall be unable to supply her with one-tenth of what she has spent each year since our marriage. And now, in these financial troubles, the remnant of her means is threatened.—But this is not the worst. Our little child, our little Gertrude, is three years old now—as beautiful as her mother, and