t,
how weary-looking and thin she was growing? And her bright color was
wellnigh gone, and there were pitiful downward lines at the corners
of her sweet mouth. Poor young Evelina was fading like one of her own
flowers, as if some celestial gardener had failed in his care of her.
And Thomas saw it, and in his heart of hearts he knew the reason, and
yet he would not yield. Not once had he entered the old Squire's
house since he attended the dead Evelina's funeral, and stood praying
and eulogizing, with her coffin between him and the living Evelina,
with her pale face shrouded in black bombazine. He had never spoken
to her since, nor entered the house; but he had written her a letter,
in which all the fierce passion and anguish of his heart was cramped
and held down by formal words and phrases, and poor young Evelina did
not see beneath them. When her lover wrote her that he felt it
inconsistent with his Christian duty and the higher aims of his
existence to take any further steps towards a matrimonial alliance,
she felt merely that Thomas either cared no more for her, or had come
to consider, upon due reflection, that she was not fit to undertake
the responsible position of a minister's wife. "It may be that in
some way I failed in my attendance upon Cousin Evelina," thought poor
young Evelina, "or it may be that he thinks I have not enough dignity
of character to inspire respect among the older women in the church."
And sometimes, with a sharp thrust of misery that shook her out of
her enforced patience and meekness, she wondered if indeed her own
loving freedom with him had turned him against her, and led him in
his later and sober judgment to consider her too light-minded for a
minister's wife. "It may be that I was guilty of great indecorum, and
almost indeed forfeited my claim to respect for maidenly modesty,
inasmuch as I suffered him to give me kisses, and did almost bring
myself to return them in kind. But my heart did so entreat me, and in
truth it seemed almost like a lack of sincerity for me to wholly
withstand it," wrote poor young Evelina in her journal at that time;
and she further wrote: "It is indeed hard for one who has so little
knowledge to be fully certain of what is or is not becoming and a
Christian duty in matters of this kind; but if I have in any manner,
through my ignorance or unwarrantable affection, failed, and so lost
the love and respect of a good man, and the opportunity to become his
helpm