Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/13



O differently does the passage of time impress itself upon the old and the young that Dr. Gray, who had spent the years between fifty and sixty upon an isolated grazing farm in the West, felt himself still a stranger and a new-comer there, while his eldest child, a girl named Stella, to whom the same period of time represented the vivid, impressionable era between eight and eighteen, felt as if this had been always her home, and looked back upon the early years spent in the city with a sense of vagueness that was like the recollection of a dream.

Stella not only thoroughly knew this lovely, wild, free country, so far from the jar and fret of crowded cities, but she thoroughly loved it too. Once she had been impatient of its social aridity and mental limitations, and had been very glad of the release from these afforded by an invitation, from a sister of her mother's, in New York, to spend a month there. She had been, then, only sixteen, and her ardent temperament had been fired at the prospect before her as nothing had ever fired it yet, but at the end of the month Stella had come home with all her tastes and wishes altered,—longing only for a continuance of the old, free, open, active life, and setting her face against every suggestion of ever leaving it again. She was Dr. Gray's only child by his first marriage, and seemed in some way to have a peculiar claim upon his tenderness. He was a reserved man, and showed his feelings