Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/378

360 "Helen! Helen!" he murmured. "Will you break your promise? Have you changed in your feeling towards me? I have brought you the pinks. Won't you take the pinks, Helen?"

Then he sighed as he added, "It was n't her fault. If she had only known—" Who was the Helen of that far-away time? Was this the colonel's love-story? How much remained untold?

But during all the night, whithersoever his mind wandered, at intervals it returned to the burden of a single strain,—the harvesting. Towards daybreak he took it up again for the last time:

"O boys, boys, boys! If you don't work faster you won't finish the field to-day. Look how low the sun is! I am going to the house. They can't finish the field to-day. Let them do what they can, but don't let them work late. I want Peter to go to the house with me. Tell him to come on." In the faint gray of the morning Peter, who had been watching by the bedside all night, stole out of the room, and going into the garden pulled a handful of pinks—a thing he had never done before—and, reëntering the colonel's bedroom, put them in a vase near his sleeping face. Soon afterwards the colonel opened his eyes and looked around him. At the foot of the bed stood Peter, and on one side sat the physician and a friend. The night lamp burned low, and through the folds of the curtains came the white light of early day.

"Put out the lamp and open the curtains," he said feebly. "It's day." When they had drawn the curtains aside, his eyes fell on the pinks, sweet and fresh with the dew on them. He stretched out his hand and touched them caressingly, and his eyes sought Peter's with a look of grateful tenderness.

"I want to be alone with Peter for a while," he said, turning his face towards the others.