She knows too well the habit of your life.
Strange feelings come over you,--feelings like half-forgotten
memories,--musical, dreamy, doubtful. You have seen a hundred faces more
brilliant than that of Madge; you have pressed a hundred jewelled hands
that have returned a half-pressure to yours. You do not exactly admire;
to love you have forgotten; you only--linger!
It is a soft autumn evening, and the harvest-moon is red and round over
the eastern skirt of woods. You are attending Madge to that little
cottage-home where lives that gentle and doting mother, who, in the
midst of comparative poverty, cherishes that refined delicacy which
never comes to a child but by inheritance.
Madge has been passing the day with Nelly. Something--it may be the soft
autumn air, wafting toward you the freshness of young days--moves you to
speak as you have not ventured to speak, as your vanity has not allowed
you to speak before.
"You remember, Madge, (you have guarded this sole token of boyish
intimacy,) our split sixpence?"
"Perfectly;" it is a short word to speak, and there is no tremor in her
tone,--not the slightest.
"You have it yet?"
"I dare say I have it somewhere;"--no tremor now; she is very composed.
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