Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 39, January, 1861 | Page 9

"Your exclamation, when highly excited or contemptuously indifferent,
is always in that tongue."
"Which am I now?"
"Really, you should know best. Here is your bawble"; and Mrs. Purcell
tossed it lightly into her hands, and went out.
It was a sheath of old morocco. The motion loosened the clasp, and the
contents, an ivory oval and a cushion of faded silk, fell to the floor. Mr.
Raleigh bent and regathered them; there was nothing for Marguerite but
to allow that he should do so. The oval had reversed in falling, so that
he did not see it; but, glancing at her before returning it, he found her
face and neck dyed deeper than the rose. Still reversed, he was about to
relinquish it, when Mrs. McLean passed, and, hearing the scampering
of little feet as they fled with booty, she also entered.
"Seeing you reminds me, Roger," said she. "What do you suppose has
become of that little miniature I told you of? I was showing it to
Marguerite the other night, and have not seen it since. I must have
mislaid it, and it was particularly valuable, for it was some nameless
thing that Mrs. Heath found among her mother's trinkets, and I begged
it of her, it was such a perfect likeness of you. Can you have seen it?"
"Yes, I have it," he replied. "And haven't I as good a right to it as any?"
He extended his arm for the case which Marguerite held, and so
touching her hand, the touch was more lingering than it needed to be;
but he avoided looking at her, or he would have seen that the late color
had fled till the face was whiter than marble.
"Your old propensities," said Mrs. McLean. "You always will be a boy.
By the way, what do you think of Mary Purcell's engagement? I
thought she would always be a girl."
"Ah! McLean was speaking of it to me. Why were they not engaged

before?"
"Because she was not an heiress."
Mr. Raleigh raised his eyebrows significantly.
"He could not afford to marry any but an heiress," explained Mrs.
McLean.
Mr. Raleigh fastened the case and restored it silently.
"You think that absurd? You would not marry an heiress?"
Mr. Raleigh did not at once reply.
"You would not, then, propose to an heiress?"
"No."
As this monosyllable fell from his lips, Marguerite's motion placed her
beyond hearing. She took a few swift steps, but paused and leaned
against the wall of the gable for support, and, placing her hand upon the
sun-beat bricks, she felt a warmth in them which there seemed to be
neither in herself nor in the wide summer-air.
Mrs. Purcell came along, opening her parasol.
"I am going to the orchard," said she; "cherries are ripe. Hear the robins
and the bells! Do you want to come?"
"No," said Marguerite.
"There are bees in the orchard, too,--the very bees, for aught I know,
that Mr. Raleigh used to watch thirteen years ago, or their
great-grand-bees,--they stand in the same place."
"You knew Mr. Raleigh thirteen years ago?" she asked, glancing up
curiously.
"Yes."
"Well?"
"Very well."
"How much is very well?"
"He proposed to me. Smother your anger; he didn't care for me; some
one told him that I cared for him."
"Did you?"
"This is what the Inquisition calls applying the question?" asked Mrs.
Purcell. "Nonsense, dear child! he was quite in love with somebody
else."
"And that was----?"
"He supposed your mother to be a widow. Well, if you won't come, I
shall go alone and read my 'L'Allegro' under the boughs, with breezes

blowing between the lines. I can show you some little field-mice like
unfledged birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then glittering eyes
and cleft fangs."
Marguerite was silent; the latter commodity was de trop. Mrs. Purcell
adjusted her parasol and passed on.
Here, then, was the whole affair. Marguerite pressed her hands to her
forehead, as if fearful some of the swarming thoughts should escape;
then she hastened up the slope behind the house, and entered and hid
herself in the woods. Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother. Of course,
then, there was not a shadow of doubt that her mother had loved him.
Horrible thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it
seemed that she loathed him,--that she despised the woman who had
given him regard. The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation;
there was no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was
alone and forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But that
could not be forever. As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old
words, old looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what