Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/72

 silence—a respect, but nothing more. Her appreciation of my face was too palpably without those reservations that so often cry louder than words.

So we sealed our secret, she and I, in an unspoken pledge, and not even Solon Denney, so keen of scent for rivals, ever divined it.

He called me out with the old boyish whistle the day he confided to me the tremendous news of his engagement. He laughed, foolish with joy as he told it, and I felt tingling in my arms that old boyish, brute impulse to slay him for the wretched ease of his victory. But we were men, so I thrust one of those rebellious arms in among the strands of the creeper, where her own arm had once been, and laid the other on his shoulder in all friendliness. This, while he rambled on of the bigness of life, the great future before Arcady of the Little Country, the importance of the Argus, which he had just founded, and the supreme excellence of that splendid mechanism, the new Washington hand-press, installed the week before.

His life was builded of these many interests, of her and himself and his country and his town. In the fulness of his heart he even brought out the latest Argus and read parts from his obituary of Douglas, while I stood stupidly striving to realize what I had long known must be true.

"A great man has fallen," he read, declaiming a little, as in our school days. "Stephen A. Douglas is dead. The voice that so lately and eloquently appealed to his countrymen is hushed in—"