84
��THE GRANITJ'. MONTHLY.
��storm, he dressed himself hastily, and started for the rendezvous of the pre- vious day. The wind was high, and as he passed the Capitol, which was then in process of building, a sudden gust loosened a piece of scaffolding which, as ill luck would have, must fall plump on the young man's head, stretching him senseless upon the ground. He was carried home again, but it was some hours before he recovered his senses. When consciousness returned it was broken and disturbed by fre- cjuent fits of delirium, which left him so weak that for a fortnight he did not rise from his bed ; and even then the doctor forbade him to leave the house for a week to come. Two or three days after this admonition had been given, good Mrs. Odlin went up stairs in the morning to call Mr. Somerton to breakfast, when, to her consternation and alarm, she found an emptv room. Edgar, in fact, was by that time far on his way to the wood that he knew so well. It was now past the middle of May, and when he came to the rock where he had met Linda before, he found the May-llowers brown and withering, with hardly a suggestion of their primal beauty. He looked about him, but nothing was to be seen save the rocks and trees. He called Linda several times by name, but the only answer was the discordant scream of an angry jay. Not knowing what to do next, but unwilling to sit idle and inactive, he began to explore the sur- rounding woods, hoping that, perhaps, notwithstanding his previous unsuc- cessful efforts, he might be able to find some indication of the way where Linda had gone when she left him : but it was all of no avail. After wan- dering up and down for some hours, he returned at last to the glen, where, oh, wonderful, there she stood — Linda herself — in all her angel mildness, gaz- ing sadly at the vacant rock. She did not see him at first, and he noticed that her fixce had grown paler, and that a settled sadness rested upon her features. When she saw him she sprang to meet him. and sank almost
��fainting in his arms. " Oh, I knew you would come," she said. " before the flowers were all dead and I was gone : but oh. where have you been all these long tired days?" Edgar explained why he had not come before, and he now determined once for all to solve the mystery that seemed to clothe the girl like a mantle. He drew her down upon the rock beside him, but all his tender (juestions were of no avail. " You will know soon," she answered in a half pitiful way, or '• You can't understand yet." •' Lin- da," he cried passionately, at last, " who and what are you ; I will not let you go until you tell me," and he clasped his arms about her yielding form, and drew her head down upon his breast. Her great brown eyes were filled with tears. Ah me 1 for a touch of holy fire, that I might tell of the rapture of the tears of love. What are sighs and what are kisses, when the heart is bursting, though not with grief; where joy is so v/ild that it joins hands with agony ; when self is lost in an ocean of forgetfulness. Time was no more, and all things were drowned in an eternal now. The hand-stroking, the gleam of her cload-like hair, the breast rising and falling with the music of her breath, the two hearts beating in accord, seemed to them Ijoth like the dream of some wild enthusiast, who has o\ erleaped the bounds of this contracted world, and melts away in the ocean of what might be. The young man seemed to feel his soul growing to a giant size, and thrilling the wide world till it grew like him- self. At last Linda rose to her feet and said slowly :
'• We each have our term of life, and I go and come with the May-tlowcrs. We are not like you. for you li\"e for ever. Though )ou seem to die, your souls live on. But now you have made me like yourself ; your soul has kindled itself in me. 1 shall go with the flowers, but my new-born soul will live for ever. Do not seek me here again, for I can not come, but I will come again with the bloom of the flowersJ'
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