" Dorcas only felt, without putting the
sense into language, that in this life-boat there was safety. But
then had she not sent her heart on a venture in the other,--that other
which even now was tossing on the waves of a future, full-freighted
with hope, and faith in her truth?
She opened the little box again, and looked at the ring and painted
pin. How sorrowfully she looked at them now, seen through tears of
conscious experience! How mournful seemed the ground hair, and
the tints woven of so many broken hopes, sad thoughts, and wrecked
expectations! the hair, kissed so many times in the weary years of
waiting, and then wept over in the drearier desolation, when the sight
could only bring thoughts of the salt waves dashing amongst it in the
deep sea! What a life that had been of poor Aunt Dorcas! Then came
across her busy thought the words of her mother,--"It's 'most always
so!"
Swan sailed very far away, in these tearful reveries, and took hope
and life with him.
When the next Sunday evening came, and the next, and the next,--and
when Dorcas had ceased to say, blushing and smiling,--"Don't, Henry!
you know I should make such a poor kind of a wife for you! and your
mother wouldn't think anything of me!"--and when, Henry had had an
offer to go to Western New York, where there were nobody knew how many
beautiful girls, all waiting to pounce on the tall, fine-looking
young farmer,--when Colonel Fox forgot he was a deacon, and swore
that Dorcas was undeserving of such a happy lot as was offered to
her,--when the tears, and the reveries, and the pictures of far-away
lands, and the hopes that might wither with long years of waiting,
were all merged and effaced in the healthy happiness of the
present,--Dorcas dried her tears, and applied herself diligently to
building up her flaxen _trousseau_, and smothered in her heart the
image of dark and brilliant beauty that had for a time occupied it.
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