With my two shaking hands I fastened the other woman's hair over my own, that would neither curl nor friz worth a cent that awful hot day. Then I put on a white muslin dress, that looked seraphically innocent, and tightened it up with a plaid silk sash, that circled my slender waist and floated off like a rainbow breaking through a cloud.

Then I took my parasol in one hand, held my flowing skirts up with the other, and went forth to meet my destiny. Oh, how my feet longed to dance! How my girlish heart beat and fluttered in this innocent bosom.

He was waiting for me in the long stoop, leaning against a post, and fanning his manly head with the broad brim of his Panama hat. Oh, how majestic, how--but language fails me here.

Arm in arm we walked along the beach. He leaned toward me, I leaned with gentle heaviness on him--delightful reciprocity--eloquent silence.

A soft breeze blew up from the ocean, and kissed us both with refreshing softness.

"Ah!" said the n.o.ble man by my side, "this is delicious."

"Deliriously so," I murmured.

"You feel the revivifying effect?" says he.

"Exquisitely," says I, leaning a little more confidingly on his stalwart arm.

He bent his stately head and looked down into my eyes. Sisters, the thrill of that glance shook my delicate frame as b.u.mble-bees set a full-blown rose to trembling when they swarm in its heart.

"Shall we go down to the sands?" says he; "the incoming tide is dashing them with coolness."

I understood the delicate meaning conveyed in these words. Nothing could be more exquisitely suggestive. The tide--what was that but his own n.o.ble self? The sands--pure, white, untrodden--in my whole life I never heard anything more typical.

"If you desire it," I said.

"If I desire it. Ah! Miss Frost, it is for you to say."

My heart leaped to this as a speckled trout snaps at a fly. Nothing so near a proposal had ever reached me before. But a New England woman is modest; she does not s.n.a.t.c.h at the first offer--far from it. I pretended not to understand the badly hidden meaning of his metaphor. A little art of this kind is feminine and excusable, even in a young girl dignified with Society membership and a mission. I felt that he could appreciate it. He did. Some people were below us on the sands. They paused to look up as this n.o.ble creature handed me down those wooden steps. The effect must have been artistical. My cloud-like skirts floated softly on the zephyrs. My scarf streamed out like a banner. I am afraid the curve of my boot might have been seen from below, for many admiring faces were turned that way, and Mr. Burke cast his eye downward in a fugitive manner.

At last we reached the sands, on which both the sun and waves were beating luminously. By a ridge of white sand he paused.

"Shall we sit here?" says he, with tender questioning.

"Anywhere," says I, with sweet feminine complacency.

Then I dropped down on the sand ridge, and sweeping my skirts together, cast a timid glance up and around.

That n.o.ble man was spreading a silk umbrella. There was a hitch in the spring, and, such was his eager impatience to occupy the seat I had so delicately suggested, that a real naughty word broke from his lips--a word I, as a missionary, never could forgive, if it hadn't been the proof of such loving impatience. As it was, like a recording angel, I blotted it out of my memory with a forgiving sigh.

That refractory umbrella was hoisted at last, and its owner placed himself on the sand beside me, holding it not seaward, but like a tent, shading us two from the whole world, while the sun took care of itself.

"This," says he, "is a sweet relief. Don't you find it so, Miss Frost?"

I answered him with a sigh, soft, but audible.

"Yes, one can draw a full breath here," says he. "I was sure you would enjoy it."

"I do, indeed," says I, playing with the sand in the innocence of my heart.

Evidently embarra.s.sed by deep feeling, he too began to sift the white sand through his fingers, which came so near mine that they made me catch my breath for fear he might clasp them. On the contrary, he gave up the temptatious exercise, and throwing a generous restraint on himself, began to talk metaphorically and metaphysically about many things, especially about gathering maple-sap, of which he questioned me tenderly, veiling the hidden meaning in his heart, by a seeming interest in our trees.

He asked me, with infinite meaning in his voice, at what period the sparkling sap began to mount up from the curly roots of our maples, and vivify the trunk, twigs, and branches of that n.o.ble tree.

I understood his meaning, delicately veiled as it was. He wished to reveal his contempt of young saplings compared to the vigorous tree. It was a poetic way of comparing young snips of things with whole-souled girls, who had all the bloom of youth, and all the strength of maturity.

I spoke my mind on the subject. I said that strength, greenness, a full-grown trunk were necessary before sweet wholesome sap could circulate from root to top of a sugar maple. That saplings amounted to just nothing at all. In fact, they kept absorbing, but gave forth nothing; that a rich maturity was desirable before the maple became important as a forest-tree or an object of wealth.

I think he understood me--or rather he understood that I, with the exquisite intuition of genius, understood him. For right off, on that, he said that he would like to live in Vermont, and own maple-trees himself; that native sugar was a sweet business, and must have a softening tendency upon those who entered into it.

He sometimes bought it of little boys in the cars, and always felt a soothing influence after eating it, that made him long to drink the native sap fresh from the tree. In fact, he took a deep interest in Vermont and all its inst.i.tutions.

While we were talking on these sweet subjects, quite a breeze sprang up from the water.

Things brighten around us. The sky looked blue. The heaving waves of the ocean began to swell and sparkle as if a diamond mine were breaking up in their depths. I am satisfied that Long Branch is all that it has been cracked up to be--and more too, when kindred souls meet on its sandy sh.o.r.es.

"How bright! how beautiful!" says he, backing off suddenly from the maple question, which had covered a world of hidden meaning, and looking out to sea, with a delicate wish, no doubt, to spare my blushes.

"Some persons have been kind enough to think so," says I, "but it isn't for me to say."

"I love the fitful changes--the soft transparency: nothing can be more lovely," says he.

The occasion required downcast eyes and shrinking silence. I gave him both. There could be no better answer for a speech so personal and yet so poetic.

"I hope you share my feelings in this."

That moment--that precious, precious moment--was broken in upon in a way that makes me clench my teeth as I write. Up the sands, racing forward like a young colt, came "that child," with her flat flying back by the strings, and a broken parasol in her hand; up she flew toward Mr. Burke.

"Come here," says she, "I want you to whip that boy out there within an inch of his life. I broke my parasol over his head, but it wasn't half enough; I want you to give it to him good."

"But what has he done," says Mr. Burke, no doubt riled to the depths of his n.o.ble heart, as I was.

"Done enough, I should think. He mimicked the way I carried my parasol, and said some folks wanted to be young ladies before they could read--that's what he has done," says the creature, flaming out like a bantam.

"Perhaps we had better go in," says Mr. Burke, lifting himself out of the sand.

"Not till you've given him hail Columbia," says the creature, taking a new grip on her broken parasol.

"I rather think he has got that," says Mr. Burke, reaching out his hand to help me up.

I arose. I jerked that Leghorn flat by the strings, and tied it under the creature's chin with a pull that made her scream. Then I took Mr.

Burke's arm and mounted the wooden steps, with a feeling at my heart that is not to be described by mortal pen. What a world of bliss that wicked little wretch broke in upon. His soul was verging towards mine so beautifully. The final words were burning on his lips when she rushed in. Still, memory is left, reason is left. I know what was in that n.o.ble heart, and that knowledge is bliss.

I felt this: I knew his meaning. To a common woman he might have said, "I love you dearly. I wish above all things to spend my life with you;"

but to a creature made up of sensitive pride and poetic niceties, unclothed proposals of this kind must be quite out of place. Of course I understood all that, and felt the refinement of his conduct deeply.

What more _could_ a man say than this? In order to be delicately personal, one must talk by comparisons. To praise the State one is born in, is to praise one's self. To seize upon any material thing for a poetical comparison with a human being, is to be intensely complimentary to that being.

For the first time in my life I feel the sweet certainty of duplication.

My heart swells with the beautiful faith of hope deferred. Those heavenly lines we have sung so often together in our meeting-house come back to my mind--