Saturday morning, seven o'clock.A month to-day since we came to France! This morning is gay. The young sunbeams are dancing on the sea, the air is soft, the sky is necked with little white clouds like a blue bay alive with sails. I have been standing on the balcony with my hair floating in the wind. Down on the grass in the garden, three plump, pretty gulls are quite at home.He prayed that he might come here early this morning, but I said No, not till eleven--the time appointed!How much there will be to ask, how much to tell! I don't understand yet how the mistake was made. All I have worked out so far is that he saw me three times with--Alice! The Derlingham know-alls, in a hurry to answer his questions before he had fairly asked them, jumped to the conclusion that he had seen me with Susan. It seems he inquired who was the shorter one, the younger one, the prettier one: and both the know-alls made haste to assure him (a courtly compliment, this, to poor me!) that it was Susan--Susan Briggs, Miss Langley's maid. Then a dozen things conspired, he says, to confirm him in his blunder, just as a dozen things have conspired to drag me into this affair and to involve me in it more and more.He has no light yet on the puzzle of last Tuesday's letter. But he loves me so much that I can tell him all: even to the showing of this book. Perhaps he has kept a book of his own, who knows? If so, I shall learn everything. But, somehow, I feel that the explanations on both sides can wait. What does it matter which way the path has turned and twisted through stones and thorns now that we have reached the goal at last?I told Susan not to call me till nine o'clock. But I mean to slip downstairs softly; I have business at Bérigny. There is reparation to be made among those white graves where I slammed the gates of my heart. And, amid the holy stillness of the morning, I am fain to chasten my spirit in the Communion of Saints. For, on this day of my happiness, do I not feel that grannie, and father and mother, and all who have ever loved me, are yearning to me out of the depths that after all are not so very deep and down from the heights that after all are not so very high? So I will go forth, through the little yellow flowers and over the sweet, crisp grass. I will go and sit in the sunshine, on the old steps of the Calvary, while all that great love yearns out to me from the unseen, fondling me and caressing me as with soft hands. I go to say my De Profundis at last, and to breathe a prayer for this poor land, where the fool hath said in his heart that there is no God.THE END.*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKSUSAN***
Saturday morning, seven o'clock.
A month to-day since we came to France! This morning is gay. The young sunbeams are dancing on the sea, the air is soft, the sky is necked with little white clouds like a blue bay alive with sails. I have been standing on the balcony with my hair floating in the wind. Down on the grass in the garden, three plump, pretty gulls are quite at home.
He prayed that he might come here early this morning, but I said No, not till eleven--the time appointed!
How much there will be to ask, how much to tell! I don't understand yet how the mistake was made. All I have worked out so far is that he saw me three times with--Alice! The Derlingham know-alls, in a hurry to answer his questions before he had fairly asked them, jumped to the conclusion that he had seen me with Susan. It seems he inquired who was the shorter one, the younger one, the prettier one: and both the know-alls made haste to assure him (a courtly compliment, this, to poor me!) that it was Susan--Susan Briggs, Miss Langley's maid. Then a dozen things conspired, he says, to confirm him in his blunder, just as a dozen things have conspired to drag me into this affair and to involve me in it more and more.
He has no light yet on the puzzle of last Tuesday's letter. But he loves me so much that I can tell him all: even to the showing of this book. Perhaps he has kept a book of his own, who knows? If so, I shall learn everything. But, somehow, I feel that the explanations on both sides can wait. What does it matter which way the path has turned and twisted through stones and thorns now that we have reached the goal at last?
I told Susan not to call me till nine o'clock. But I mean to slip downstairs softly; I have business at Bérigny. There is reparation to be made among those white graves where I slammed the gates of my heart. And, amid the holy stillness of the morning, I am fain to chasten my spirit in the Communion of Saints. For, on this day of my happiness, do I not feel that grannie, and father and mother, and all who have ever loved me, are yearning to me out of the depths that after all are not so very deep and down from the heights that after all are not so very high? So I will go forth, through the little yellow flowers and over the sweet, crisp grass. I will go and sit in the sunshine, on the old steps of the Calvary, while all that great love yearns out to me from the unseen, fondling me and caressing me as with soft hands. I go to say my De Profundis at last, and to breathe a prayer for this poor land, where the fool hath said in his heart that there is no God.
THE END.
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKSUSAN***