Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/131

 *faster light in his eyes, and a more resolved look on his fine forward.

He see Anna every Sunday in church, and, though he obeyed her mother and didn't give her any outward attention, yet there is a stiddy attention of the soul that a woman can't misunderstand when it is wroppin' her completely round and round. There is a language of the eyes beyend Tamer Ann Smith to parse; it wuzn't in her grammar at all. And if she couldn't parse it it wuzn't likely that she could stop it. No, she might as well try to stop the vivid language of the skies when the hidden forces of nature speaks out in sheets of flame.

Tom's eyes, as they met Anna's in the old meetin' house, held hull love poems, glowin' stories of deathless devotion and faith in her. And Anna read 'em, she alone held the key to the divine unwritten language; the love in her own heart could alone translate the love in his.

Well, it had run along so for more than a year, and Anna wuz twenty and Tom wuz twenty-three; Tom workin' hard and beginnin' to be spoke of as a young lawyer who would rise in the world. And Anna stayin' to home and tryin' to be dutiful (duty made hard by naggin'). Havin' to use Von Crank well under her mother's eyes and freezin' him in lonely moments, froze one minute by Anna and thawed out the next by Tamer Ann, and kep' kinder soft and sloshy all the time by his love for Anna, Von Crank wuzn't to be envied much more than Tom.

But Tamer Ann (for he had acted up to his high station as a Poltroon, and kinder relied on Tamer Ann to bring Anna round when he knew in his heart that she