Page:Peterson Magazine 1869B.pdf/182

 AT THE FALLS.

BY FRANK LEE BENEDICT.

The sun was almost setting, and such a glory of gorgeous lights flashed in at the windows, that it seemed a shame to stay in-doors longer.

May Crofton caught up her hat, and called to  her cousin, who was standing looking out toward the Falls, worlds away from the possibility of remembering that there was any human being near.

“Do come out, Cora,” May said; “I shall go wild if I keep quiet a moment longer.”

Miss Lasley had to be called several times, and very impatiently at the end, before she even heard. Then she turned, looked at pretty little May with her great, absent eyes, and took up her parasol in silence, nodding to her cousin in sign that she was ready to obey her commands; for, like most people, she seldom had the heart to refuse tiny May anything that she desired.

They were stopping at the Cataract House, under the charge of May’s mother, and, thanks to the lateness of the season, they had managed to pass several very quiet and undisturbed days.

The autumn weather, late as it was, kept almost the softness and warmth of summer, and the girls lived principally out-of-doors. May thought to herself that there might be too much of a good thing—quiet, for instance; but Cora seemed to enjoy it so greatly that she bore it like a little martyr, and hoped for better things, especially as she had managed to let several of her adorers know in what place Cora’s caprice had landed them.

For I am afraid that I must admit Cora Lasley was capricious, but in a grand, stately way; not because she wanted excitement, but because she had grown tired of it, and went wandering about in search of rest, which she could not find, because the turmoil and great want were within.

She was twenty-four years old, and very weary of being a beauty and an heiress; and she knew the world, that is, the society world, from New York to Rome, and its Vanity Fairs were all alike dreary and empty to her.

Not that she had any great cross or trouble— it would have done her good if she could have stumbled upon one—but she was only disillusionee and bored, which is worse. She was tired of wondering what she ought to make of her life, tired of doing nothing, and was always reproaching herself for her waste of existence, and for not knowing how to remedy matters. If she only had something to do—some aim to interest her, she said to herself.

She had been a secret source of uneasiness to her aunt for years, much as the latter loved her; but Cora was so odd, took such strange fancies, that Mrs. Crofton was sometimes fairly afraid she would turn actress, or moral reformer, or something else dreadful and preposterous. As for marrying and being sensible, there seemed less and less hope of that, for she had refused all sorts of men, from Wall street brokers up to German barons, and was no more to be interested in the most fascinating of the opposite sex, than if she had been a snow woman animated by a spell.-

May Crofton was four years younger than her cousin, the prettiest, blithest, happiest little fairy, that ever made sunshine wherever she moved, extravagantly fond of Cora, and about the only person who was not a little afraid of her grand airs and moods.

Cora would permit her to tense and revile her, and was devotedly attached to her in return; but even to May she did not reveal the fact that, away back in her life, when she was a girl of seventeen, she had lived her little romance, and grown heartily ashamed of it and its hero. She had known for ages that she had never loved the man; but she believed that her youthful folly had taken from her the possibility of ever loving any other, and she had grown suspicious of them as a class, and harder upon their peculiar frailties than, perhaps, they deserved, because, after all, men deserve a little mercy as well as women; and no woman, even a bad one, will ever understand everything about such matters.

The girls wandered out of sight and hearing of everything human, and sat down against a ledge of rocks, where they could look away over that grandest marvel of nature, which only grows more grand as one becomes accustomed to its presence.

May was looking at the clouds and dreaming her pretty dreams, for she was imaginative enough in her way; but Cora kept gazing down into the awful abyss, and being in one of her

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