"Well, I never!" said Miss Chatterwits. "An elopement, I do believe! I'm glad I'm most through this skirt, so's I can run over to Mrs. Fetchum's and tell her. I guess she didn't read the paper very carefully this morning. If she'd seen it she'd 'a' been over here to find out how we took it. It's always safe to read the papers.

"Well, how do you feel, Miss Theodora?" she asked at last.

But Miss Theodora never told any one exactly how she felt when she heard of the strange ending of Ernest's love affair. To Ernest, of course, she gave a full measure of sympathy; and she was almost sorry that, as things had turned out, he would never know that she had made up her mind to make Eugenie's acquaintance. Since she had, though for only a brief time, almost changed her point of view, she felt herself to be hypocritical in receiving his praise for her ac.u.men: "You knew better than I what she was like."

Kate was indignant at her brother's treachery.

"I shall never forgive him for deceiving Ernest so. But I can't say that I'm surprised. I knew that she and Ralph had had a great flirtation even before she met Ernest. It was that which made me so unwilling to call on her. But I never thought that Ralph would marry her. Mamma, I believe, is going to receive her as if everything had been perfectly above board. But I know it's only pride that leads her to take this stand. She really feels the whole thing very keenly."

Ben, when he heard of the elopement, could not help recalling the episode of the stolen skates, and he wondered if Ralph had made love to Eugenie from the mischievous motives by which he had so often in their boyhood allowed himself to be influenced against Ernest. If so, he was likely to be the meter out of his own punishment. For a bride stolen merely to annoy another person is likely to make more trouble than any other stolen possession.

Strangely enough, Ernest himself recovered most quickly from the mortification of the whole affair. There was at first the shock to his pride, mingled with contempt for the deceit practised on him by Ralph and Eugenie. But he was so young as to recover quickly, and the element of contempt helped him to brush the whole matter aside.

You, perhaps, may think less well of Ernest for finding consolation so readily, but you must remember that he never was a sentimentalist.

Moreover, neither you nor I may know exactly what the workings of his mind may have been. Doubtless there was many a sleepless night, and many a bitter tear, before he was ready to show a stern front to the world.

In Boston it might have been a much harder thing for him to bear the blow which fate had leveled at him. After all, Ma.s.sachusetts and Colorado are far apart; and if propinquity is fate bearing, distance and separation are more destructive of sentimental illusions than the average sentimentalist admits. In Ernest's case, hard work was absorbing, and even Grace Easton, William Easton's pretty young daughter, was a long time in winning the place which she afterward held in his heart.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

XXVI.

You who look at the simple events which I have been relating (from the outside and at a distance) may have other criticisms to make of Ernest.

You may think it impossible that a youth so well placed, as he was at Harvard, should have turned his back upon its paths of pleasantness for the narrower way that meant so much hard work. Yet Ernest had not allowed himself to be led or governed by an illusion. In the whole world the serious student, the man who has his own way to make, can find no better opportunity than at Harvard. No one could realize this better than Ernest himself, in that time of storm and stress when he had felt that the chart of his life must be mapped out by his own hand. But his, he saw, was a special case, and the surest way to free himself from all entanglements and to place himself at the command of duty, was, he thought, to start out on an entirely new course. It was his Puritan inheritance, this devotion to duty when once duty had shown clearly her kindly but resolute visage.

Yet my story has been ill told if it has seemed to be more the story of Ernest than of Miss Theodora. For very few of us does life hold any marked surprises, any startling events. A whole life is often merely the summary of many very commonplace happenings. Its real events are more likely to be those moral crises when the soul must put itself in harmony with all those external happenings which it has no power to control. Nor is it one of the least of life's lessons that it would be indeed a fatal gift, if it were ours--this longed for power to turn the tide of events.

Take, for example, the case of Miss Theodora; what a feeble figure she had been in her efforts to turn the current of affairs that made up her life. How helpless her will to accomplish her desires!

If John had not married Dorothy--if Ernest had been willing to take his grandfather's profession--if he had never met Eugenie--if he and Kate had never cared for each other,--with all these "ifs" turned into verities, how different, Miss Theodora thought, had been her outlook on life. But we, who regard these things from the point of view of the impartial onlooker, know that the fulfilling of her desires would not have made her happiness, nor for the happiness of her nephew.

If in trying to show you this I have seemed to dwell too long on the ordinary happenings in a simple life, remember that these, after all, were not the things which I count of chief importance.

To me the great events in Miss Theodora's life were those three occasions when she had to summon her strength to great decisions. These soul crises counted for more than any other happenings in her life.

First, there was that struggle when she had to choose between her lover and her nephew; then, almost as severe, though different in kind, the battle in which at last she had given in to Ernest in his choice of a profession; and last, although it had had no outward result, her merging of her own prejudice against Eugenie in a readiness to do what would probably make Ernest happier.

Hardly less bitter than these three struggles was the one which Miss Theodora waged to decide whether or not it was her duty to join Ernest in the West. At last she yielded in this more quickly though with greater pain than in the two cases when she had given in to Ernest about Harvard and about Eugenie.

She left Boston with the less reluctance, perhaps, because of certain changes--some persons called them "improvements"--that had begun to appear in her well-loved West End. The tall apartment houses which had begun to creep in even before she left the city, the electric cars now dashing through Charles street, were innovations that cut her to the heart.

The breaking up of her modest little home soon followed.

"You will spend half of every year with us," said Kate, now pleasantly situated in a house whose western windows overlooked the river. She had already begun to make life pleasant for Ben's sisters, one of whom was always staying with her.

"That will depend upon Ernest," Miss Theodora had answered, smiling. As a matter of fact, she did not return to Boston, even for a visit, until after Ernest's marriage; and so with her removal to Colorado, her story--as a West End story--may be said to end.

But if I should tell you more about Miss Theodora, I would describe the delightful New England home which, with Diantha's help, she made for Ernest in Denver. Nor would I be able to omit telling of the romance which came into her own life.

At first she tried to avoid meeting William Easton, now a widower; but efforts of this kind, of course, were useless. They met calmly enough; and as they talked together, the years that had pa.s.sed seemed as nothing.

"So you have come West, after all, Theodora--and for Ernest's sake, too, though it was for his sake you refused to come so long ago."

"Yes," she said, "for Ernest's sake it seems, though when I see how much he owes to you, I realize that you are more than kind--almost cruelly kind--"

Then William Easton, smiling somewhat sadly, said nothing in reply, though indeed there was no need of words. We all know how a story of this kind ends in books; and even in real life old lovers sometimes renew the pledges of youth.

(The End.)