"Poor thing!" exclaimed Cordelia, her voice softening with the sudden change in her quick sympathy. "Poor girl! and we didn't try to help her or to make her feel easy. I hate myself for it. I see how mean I have been. It would have been so easy to have smoothed things for her, too!"
Moreton felt a temptation to seize this warm-hearted, impulsive girl and press her close to his breast. Indeed he had a right to be sorely tempted, for she was a strong, lithe, blooming maiden, whose steadfast honesty and purity glowed in her eyes and on her lips. Then there was the dreamy sunshine and the checkered shade and the softly rippling breeze to add to his mood, and yonder was the slumberous river lapsing away between its brakes. But he satisfied himself with simply looking at her and allowing her beauty to freshen and sweeten his heart.
"I suppose it is selfish and narrow," he presently said; "but I am heartily glad that all of them are gone--that we are left alone together, aren't you?"
She laughed, but she blushed as well, and looked away from him as she answered in what she meant for a very careless tone:
"Oh, I like company and bright talk and the excitement of numbers; it exhilarates me. This will be a dull old place, now that the party has dwindled down to four or five. I hope my father has almost run the gamut of his cartridges."
"Not a dull place," he said with a peculiar emphasis, "a dreamy, fascinating place, rather. The river yonder, see how it glimmers, and this breeze; I never was so happy at any place as I am here and now. There is a sort of mystery in the influence of things around us."
She looked at him with a quick inquiry in her clear eyes, as if to discover whether or not he was jesting. Something in his bold yet tender gaze parried her glance and her lids dropped. She drooped her head and shoulders a little, too, as if under some suddenly imposed burden.
"Aren't you very happy here?" he went on, leaning a little toward her. "I want you to be very happy."
"Oh, yes, I'm always happy. I never was unhappy in my life," she answered with a show of vehemence, instead of the careless lightness that she intended should appear. "I'm never serious enough to become sad."
Moreton looked at her with tender fervor, the power of love full upon him, and yet the silly rhyme kept ringing in his brain: