But
he's lost and gone! Your Aunt Dorcas never had no more suitors after
that, and she kind o' gin in, and never had no sperits."
Dorcas's eyes filled, and she closed the box.
Henry Mowers would not come to the Fox farm till the next Sunday
night. That was as much settled as the new moon. So Dorcas had the
whole week to herself, to be thoroughly unhappy in,--all the more so,
a thousand times more so, for being utterly incapable of saying or
seeing why. An instinctive delicacy kept her from showing to any
of the family that she was even depressed; and her voice was heard
steadily warbling one of Wesley's hymns, or "Wolfe's Address to his
Army," in clear, brilliant tones, that rang up-stairs and down. The
general impression of distance and water associated her absent lover
with all that was heroic and romantic in song; for of novels she knew
nothing,--the Colonel's library being limited, in the imaginative
line, to a torn copy of the "Iliad," which had been left at the house
by a travelling cobbler.
However, romance is before all rules, and shapes its own adventures.
The beauty of Swan Day, which, dark and slight as it was, gleamed with
a power for Dorcas's eye and heart before which Buonarotti's
would have been only pale stone forever,--that beauty dwelt in her
imagination and memory, as only first romantic impressions can.
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