Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/579

1858.] And Addy looked,

So Mrs. Marmaduke exalted her horn and exceedingly magnified her manoeuvring office. On the strength of it, she treated herself to profuse felicitations and fished among her neighbors for more.

now I will let you into a secret, which, according to the received rules for story-construction, should be barred against you yet a little longer. I will fling it wide open at once, instead of holding it ajar and admitting you edgewise, as it were, one conjecture at a time.

Miss Wimple had a lover;—she had had him since six months before her father died, and the decayed publisher had never guessed of him nor Sally confessed him; for the good, thoughtful daughter knew it would but complicate the old man's perplexities and cares to no purpose. To be sure, his joyful consent was certain; but so long as he lived, "the thing was not to be thought of," she said, and it was not wise to plant in his mind a wish with which her duty could not accord. So Sally's lover was hushed up,—hidden in discretion as in a closet.

Simon Blount was his name, and he was a young farmer of five hundred acres in first-rate cultivation, with barns, stables, and offices in complete repair,—a well-stocked, well-watered place, with "all the modern improvements," and convenient to the Hendrik branch of the New York and Bunker Hill railroad.

The young man had inherited this very neat property from his father,—a thriving, intelligent farmer of the best class, Mr. Wimple's oldest friend, his playmate in boyhood, and his crony when he died. Simon's mother and Sally's had likewise been schoolmates, and intimates to the last, fondly attached to each other, and mutually confiding in each other's love and truth in times of pain and trouble.

But Mr. Blount and Mrs. Wimple had been dead these ten years;—they died in the same month. Simon and Sally were children when that happened, and since then they had grown up together in the closest family intimacy, interrupted only by Sally's winter schooling in New York, and renewed every summer by her regular seasons at Hendrik.

To the young man and the ripening maiden, then, their love came as naturally as violets and clover-blooms, and was as little likely to take their parents or the familiar country-folk by surprise.

When Simon took trips to New York, he "stopped" at Mr. Wimple's, and Sally's summer home in Hendrik was always "Aunt Phoebe's," as she had been taught to call Simon's mother.

You will wonder, then, that Mr. Paul Wimple should have blushed and struggled and died in the forlorn little "Athenaeum," and that Sally should sit down in her loneliness and "that fright of a delaine" to wait for customers that came not, when in their old friends' house were comfortable mansions, and in their old friends' hearts tearful kisses and welcome free as air. But you must remember that with sudden poverty comes, often, shrinking pride, and a degree of suspicion, and high scorn of those belittled pensioners who hang upon old ties; that old age, when it is sorely beset, is not always patient, clear-sighted, and just; that, when the heart of a young girl, in Sally's extremity, carries the helpless love that had been clad in purple, and couched in eider, and pampered with bonny cats, and served in gold, to Pride, and asks, "Stern master, what shall I do with this now?" the answer will be, "Strip it of its silken fooleries,—let it lie on the ground, the broad bosom of its honest, hearty mother,—teach it the