Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/249

Rh "Why, you queer old Will," said Jim, "what do you mean! You ought to be just as proud as I. She 's just as much your sister as mine."

"She is n't either your sister or mine, old fellow," said I, "and it 's no place for a girl like her—up on this platform for a mob of men to look at. I 'm going to take her farther back;" and I easily persuaded them all to move into a more retired seat, here we could talk more quietly.

The memory of the next two weeks is to me like the memory of a dream—a dream of a lifetime passed in some fairy land, through whose scenes floated one peerless being, robed in such robes as mortals do not wear. There were evening parties, and there were drives, and there were breakfasts and dinners, and there were days in cars, and days on mountain tops. After the exercises of the Commencement were over, we went to the White Mountains for a week, and then home to the parsonage. It is certain that I moved and spoke through it all like a calm and rational man, for no one wondered or demurred at anything I did; and the atmosphere of all our hours together was one of affectionate and unbroken hilarity; but the best proof of the overwrought state in which I was really living is the fact that when all was over, and I sat down at home to recall the incidents of the journey, I had literally not one single memory of any of the scenes through which I had passed. I had only a series of pictures of Ally, sometimes with a floating