She will even tease you in her pleasant way, until hope almost changes to despair, and your brow grows pale with the dread--that even now your unworthiness may condemn you.
It is summer weather; and you have been walking over the hills of home with Madge and Nelly. Nelly has found some excuse to leave you,--glancing at you most teasingly as she hurries away.
You are left sitting with Madge upon a bank tufted with blue violets. You have been talking of the days of childhood, and some word has called up the old chain of boyish feeling, and joined it to your new hope.
What you would say crowds too fast for utterance, and you abandon it. But you take from your pocket that little, broken bit of sixpence,--which you have found after long search,--and without a word, but with a look that tells your inmost thought, you lay it in the half-opened hand of Madge.
She looks at you with a slight suffusion of color,--seems to hesitate a moment,--raises her other hand, and draws from her bosom by a bit of blue ribbon a little locket. She touches a spring, and there falls beside your relique--another, that had once belonged to it.
----And you pass your arm now, unchecked, around that yielding, graceful figure, and fold her to your bosom with the swift and blessed assurance that your fullest and noblest dream of love is won!
What a glow there is to the sun! What warmth--yet it does not oppress you: what coolness--yet it is not too cool. The birds sing sweetly; you catch yourself watching to see what new songsters they can be: they are only the old robins and thrushes, yet what a new melody is in their throats!
The clouds hang gorgeous shapes upon the sky,--shapes they could hardly ever have fashioned before. The grass was never so green, the buttercups were never so plentiful; there was never such a life in the leaves. It seems as if the joyousness in you gave a throb to nature that made every green thing buoyant.
Faces, too, are changed: men look pleasantly; children are all charming children; even babies look tender and lovable. The street-beggar at your door is suddenly grown into a Belisarius, and is one of the most deserving heroes of modern times. Your mind is in a continued ferment; you glide through your toil--dashing out sparkles of passion--like a ship in the sea. No difficulty daunts you: there is a kind of buoyancy in your soul that rocks over danger or doubt, as sea-waves heave calmly and smoothly over sunken rocks.