At Last | Page 5

positive that I heard you, while Mrs. Sutton was lamenting your drowsy proclivities after sunrise."
"I have been sitting in the summer-house for an hour--reading!" protested Mabel, wondrously resigned to the detention, after a single, and not violent attempt at release. "If you had opened your shutters you must have seen me. But I knew I was secure from observation on that side of the house, at least until eight o'clock, about which time the glories of the new day usually penetrate very tightly-closed lids. As to dew--there isn't a drop upon grass or blossom. And, by the same token, we shall have a storm within twenty-four hours."
"Is that true? That is a meteorological presage I never heard of until now."
"There is a moral in it, which I leave you to study out for yourself, while I arrange the roses I--and not the gardener--gathered."
In a whisper, she subjoined--"Let me go! Some one is coming!" and in a second more was at the sideboard, hurrying the flowers into the antique china bowl, destined to grace the centre of the breakfast table.
"Good-morning, Miss Rosa. You are just in season to enjoy the society of your sister," Frederic said, lightly, pointing to the billows of mingled white and red, tossing under Mabel's fingers.
The new-comer approached the sideboard, leaned languidly upon her elbow, and picked up a half-blown bud at random from the pile.
"They are scentless!" she complained.
"Because dewless!" replied Mabel, with profound gravity. "It is the tearful heart that gives out the sweetest fragrance."
"I have more faith in sunshine," interrupted Rosa, a tinge of contempt in her smile and accent. "Or--to drop metaphors, at which I always bungle--it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to be good. All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous balderdash, according to my doctrine. A buried thing is but one degree better than a dead one. What it is the fashion of poets and sentimentalists to call perfume, is the odor of incipient decay."
"You are illustrating your position by means of my poor oriental pearl," remonstrated Mabel, playfully, wresting the hand that was beating the life and whiteness out of the floweret upon the marble top of the beaufet. "Take this hardy geant de batailles, instead. My bouquet must have a cluster of pearls for a heart."
"What a fierce crimson!" Frederic remarked upon the widely-opened rose Miss Tazewell received in place of the delicate bud. "That must be the 'hue angry, yet brave,' which, Mr. George Herbert asserts, 'bids the rash gazer wipe his eye.'"
"More poetical nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a thorn into the pupil."
No one answered, except by the indulgent smile that usually greeted her sallies, howeve? absurd, among those accustomed to the spoiled child's vagaries.
Mabel was making some leisurely additions to her bouquet in the shape of ribbon grass and pendent ivy sprays, coaxing these with persuasive touches to trail over the edge and entwine the pedestal of the salver on which her bowl was elevated; her head set slightly on one side, her lips apart in a smile of enjoyment in her work and in herself. It was a picture the lover studied fondly--one that hung forever thereafter in his gallery of mental portraits. Beyond a pair of fine gray eyes, the pliant grace of her figure and the buoyant carriage of youth, health, and a glad heart, Mabel's pretensions to beauty were comparatively few, said the world. Frederic Chilton had, nevertheless, fallen in love with her at sight, and considered her, now, the handsomest woman of his acquaintance. Her dress was a simple lawn--a sheer white fabric, with bunches of purple grass bound up with yellow wheat, scattered over it; her hair was lustrous and abundant, and her face, besides being happy, was frank and intelligent, with wonderful mobility of expression. In temperament and sentiment; in capacity for, and in demonstration of affection, she suited Frederic to the finest fibre of his mind and heart. He, for one, did not carp at Aunt Rachel's declaration that they were intended to spend time and eternity together.
Still, Mabel Aylett was not a belle, and Rosa Tazewell was. Callow collegians and enterprising young merchants from the city; sunbrowned owners of spreading acres and hosts of laborers; students and practitioners of law and medicine, and an occasional theologue, had broken their hearts for perhaps a month at a time, for love of her, since she was a school-girl in short dresses. Yet there had been a date very far back