Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/97

1868.] believe he means to offer himself. He isn't a marrying man. He brings out girls that have the making of belles in them and other men take them off his hands. He is a universal lover of the sex."

Hester smiled satisfiedly.

"It would be a shame for him to marry this one. He is altogether too fascinating to be thrown away upon a poor minister's daughter. He might look higher."

"TheThe [sic] sun was an hour high as Jessie descended the granite steps of the Provost House. The college buildings lay to her right, upon rising ground separated from that on which she was by a shallow valley. Instead of taking the street that led through this, she turned sharply to the left, and began another and steeper ascent. There were few residences in this quarter of the town, and these were gentlemen's villas separated from one another by large gardens. She met no one in her walk. The day was cold, but still; the hills beyond the ice-bound river, that came into view from the summit of that she had climbed, were strongly defined against a pale orange sky into which the color seemed to be frozen, so unvarying was it, as the sun rolled horizonward. She did not give it a glance, nor halt at the top of the eminence to regain breath. Fleetly as she had mounted it, she performed the journey down the other side, holding on her course to the bridge connecting the town with the country.

She was doing more than escaping the malignant tongue that had blackened her lover's fair fame. She despised Hester Sanford; and three months before she would have laughed to scorn the tale to which she had just listened, dissected the ill-formed mass of contradictions, and refuted her statements by a comparison of their incongruities. She was incapable of such attempt now. The foundations of reason and belief had been undermined—she would have said by the terrible exposure of the real character of him in whom she had trusted; in reality, by an insidious current that had been at work for weeks that outnumbered the days in which she had known Miss Sanford. She was trying to walk away from herself and the tempest of passion raging within her. By-and-by, she would think—weigh evidence and draw conclusions.

"How dared they?" she had said between her teeth, in leaving Judge Provost's portico. When midway across the bridge, she spoke again—a hoarse whisper it hurt her throat to sibilate.

"If this be true!" she said, and struck her breast hard with her clenched hand. There was a bruise the next day where the blow had fallen; but she did not feel it when she dealt it.

A moment later, she became conscious that some one was coming on behind her with quick steps, which echoed loudly on the frosted planks. Her first unwise impulse was to increase her speed, in the hope of getting away from the intruder, whoever he might be. But finding, before she reached the opposite shore, that he gained upon her, she slackened her pace to let him pass. She would the sooner be alone and unobserved, if she suffered him to go on. She detected nothing familiar in the footfall, but she did remark, with a sense of irritation, that his movement was more deliberate in nearing her. Annoyance was exchanged momentarily for active alarm as a hand touched her elbow, before her pursuer had breath to accost her.

"ItIt [sic] was Orrin Wyllys's voice that said, laughingly, then: "Is it Atalanta, or 'swift Camilla scouring the plain,' whom I have chased for the last ten minutes? What are you running away from?"

"The Furies!"