The Happy Average. Brand Whitlock

drew close to her. “I loved you at first sight,” he whispered.

      “Did you?” She looked at him in reverence.

      “Yes,—from the very first moment. When you came into the room, I knew that—”

      “What?”

      “That you were the woman I had always loved and waited for; that I had found my ideal. And yet they say we never discover our ideals in this life!”

      He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.

      “What did you think then?” he asked.

      She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf with the toe of her little shoe.

      “I loved you then too.”

      He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.

      “Isn’t it wonderful?” he said presently, “this love of ours? It came to us all at once!”

      She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper lip was raised.

      “It was love at first sight, wasn’t it?”

      “Yes. We were intended for each other.”

      They sat there, and went over that first night of their meeting and that other night at Greenwood Lake, finding each moment some new and remarkable feature of their love, something that proved its divine and providential quality, something that convinced them that no one before had ever known such a remarkable experience. They marveled at the mystery of it.

      But at last they must return to practical questions, and they resumed the account of their family relations. Marley told Lavinia about his father and mother, about his sister who had died, and then about his grandparents, and his uncles and aunts. He told her even of Dolly, behind whom she had driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father’s love for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew upon his father the criticism parishioners ever have ready for their pastor. And he told her about his home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain transient ministers, and how the church laid missionary work upon her, until he feared the heathen would unwittingly break her down.

      He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary to bring up all at once the arrears of her knowledge of him and his family, of all his affairs. Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically, and falling in love at first sight, according to the prearrangement of the ages, they could excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each other’s lives. They bemoaned all the years they had been compelled to live without knowing each other, and their one quarrel with fate was that they had had to wait until so late in life before meeting; and yet they finally consoled themselves for this deprivation by discovering that they had really always known and loved each other. They were now able to compare strange experiences of soul and, in the new light they possessed, to identify them as communings of their spirits across time and space.

      “I’ve always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians,” Lavinia said, “but I never really understood before what they meant by affinities.”

      They looked at each other in a silence that became somber, and was broken at last by Lavinia.

      “I’ve told mama,” she said.

      “You have?” Marley gasped.

      “Yes.”

      “And she—?”

      “She was sweet about it. She will love you, I know.”

      Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia’s mother. And then his fear returned at Lavinia’s sinister,

      “But—”

      “But what?”

      “She says we must wait.”

      “Oh!” Marley said with a relief. He felt their present happiness so great that he could afford to waive any claim on the future. And yet he was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression lay on Lavinia. He wondered what its cause could be. Presently it came to him suddenly.

      “And your father?” he asked.

      “He doesn’t know—yet.”

      “Will he—?”

      “He’s very—” she hesitated, not liking to seem disloyal to her father. Finally she said “peculiar,” and then further qualified it by adding “sometimes.”

      The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers’ hearts came over them, and yet they found a kind of joy in that too.

      “I’ll go to him, of course,” Marley said presently.

      “Oh, you’re so brave!”

      But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley. It rather suggested terrors he had not thought of. Yet in the necessity of maintaining the manly spirit he forced a laugh.

      “Of course,” he continued, “I’ll go to him. I meant to from the first.”

      “But not just yet,” she pleaded.

      “Well,” he yielded, not at all unwillingly, “it shall be as you say.”

      He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he conquer his own. A little tremor ran through her, and he felt it electrically along his arm.

      “What is it, sweetheart?” he pleaded. “Tell me, won’t you? We must have no secrets, you know.”

      “Oh, Glenn,” she broke out, “I’m afraid!”

      She spoke with intuitive apprehension.

      “Of what?”

      “Our happiness!”

      He tried to laugh again.

      “Do you think it will ever be?” she asked.

      “I know it,” he said earnestly. “I have nothing but faith—our love is strong enough for anything!”

      “You comfort me,” she said simply.

      Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and the house sounded until long after midnight with the low, monotonous drone of their confidential voices.

      CHAPTER VII

      AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION

      Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge Blair had gone to Cincinnati, and the news filled him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He found Lavinia and her mother on the veranda, and Lavinia said, with a grave simplicity: