Bylow Hill | Page 2

I could know where Leonard is," she mused aloud.
"Did you hear me, Ruth? I say I don't try any more, now."
"Well, that's right! I wonder where that brother of mine is?"
The baffled lover had to call up his patience. "Well, that's right, too," he laughed; "and I wonder where that brother of mine is? I wonder if they're together?"
They moved on, but at the stately entrance of the Winslow garden they paused again. The girl gave her companion a look of distress, and the young man's brow darkened. "Say it," he said. "I see what it is."
"You speak of Arthur"--she began.
"Well?"
"What did you make out of his sermon this morning?"
"Why, Ruth, I--What did you make out of it?"
"I made out that the poor boy is very, very unhappy."
"Did you? Well, he is; and in a certain way I'm to blame for it."
The girl's smile was tender. "Was there ever anything the matter with Arthur, and you didn't think you were in some way to blame for it?"
"Oh, now, don't confuse me with Leonard. Anyhow, I'm to blame this time! Has Isabel told you anything, Ruth?"
"Yes, Isabel has told me!"
"Told you they are engaged?"
"Told me they are engaged!"
"Well," said the young man, "Arthur told me last night; and I took an elder brother's liberty to tell him he had played Leonard a vile trick."
"Godfrey!"
"That would make a much happier nature than Arthur's unhappy, wouldn't it?"
Ruth was too much pained to reply, but she turned and called cheerily, "Father, do you know where Leonard is?"
The father gathered his voice and answered huskily, laying one hand upon his chest, and with the other gesturing up by the Winslow elm to the grove behind it.
She nodded. "Yes!... With Arthur, you say?... Yes!... Thank you!... Yes!" She passed with Godfrey through the wide gate.
"That's like Leonard," said the lover. "He'll tell Arthur he hasn't done a thing he hadn't a perfect right to do."
"And Arthur has not, Godfrey. He has only been less chivalrous than we should have liked him to be. If he had been first in the field, and Leonard had come in and carried her off, you would have counted it a perfect mercy all round."
"Ho-oh! it would have been! Leonard would have made her happy. Arthur never can, and she can never make him so. But what he has done is not all: look how he did it! Leonard was his beloved and best friend"--
"Except his brother Godfrey"--
"Except no one, Ruth, unless it's you. I'm neither persuasive nor kind, nor often with him. Proud of him I was, and never prouder than when I knew him to be furiously in love with her, while yet, for pure, sweet friendship's sake, he kept standing off, standing off."
"I wish you might have seen it, Godfrey. It was so beautiful--and so pitiful!"
"It was manly,--gentlemanly; and that was enough. Then all at once he's taken aback! All control of himself gone, all self-suppression, all conscience"--
"The conscience has returned," said the girl.
"Oh, not to guide him! Only to goad him! Fifty consciences can't honorably undo the mischief now!"
"Did I not write you that there was already, then, a coolness between her and Leonard?"
"Yes; but the whole bigness and littleness of Arthur's small, bad deed lies in the fact that, though he knew that coolness was but a momentary tiff, with Isabel in the wrong, he took advantage of it to push his suit in between and spoil as sweet a match as two hearts were ever making."
"It was more than a tiff, Godfrey; it"--
"Not a bit more! not--a--bit!"
"Yes!--yes--it was a problem! a problem how to harmonize two fine natures keyed utterly unlike. Leonard saw that. That is why he moved so slowly."
"Hmm!" The lover stared away grimly. "I know something about slowness. I suppose it's a virtue--sometimes."
"I think so," said the girl, caressing a flower.
"Ah, well!" responded the other. "She has chosen a nature now that--Oh me!... Ruth, I shall speak to her mother! I am the only one who can. I'll see Mrs. Morris some time this evening, and lay the whole thing out to her as we four see it who have known one another almost from the one cradle."
Ruth smiled sadly. "You will fail. I think the matter will have to go on as it is going. And if it does, you must remember, Godfrey, we do not really know but they may work out the happiest union. At any rate, we must help them to try."
"If they insist on trying, yes; and that will be the best for Leonard."
"The very best. One thing we do know, Godfrey: Arthur will always be a passionate lover, and dear Isabel is as honest and loyal as the day is long."
"The day is not long; this one is not--to me. It's most lamentably short, and to-morrow