TESSA WADSWORTH’S DISCIPLINE.

I.—HEARTS THAT SEEMED TO DIFFER.

She was standing one afternoon on the broad piazza, leaning against the railing, with color enough in her usually colorless cheeks as she watched the tall figure passing through the low gateway; he turned towards the watching eyes, smiled, and touched his hat.

“You will be in again this week,” she said coaxingly, “you can give me ten minutes out of your busy-ness.”

“Twice ten, perhaps.”

The light that flashed into her eyes was her only reply; she stood leaning forward, playing with the oleander blossoms under her hand until he had seated himself in his carriage and driven away; not until the brown head and straw hat had disappeared behind the clump of willows at the corner did she stir or move her eyes, then the happy feet in the bronze slippers tripped up-stairs to her own chamber. Dinah had left her slate on a chair, and dropped her algebra on the carpet, at the sound of Norah’s voice below the window.

Tessa was glad to be alone; she was always glad to be alone after Ralph Towne had left her, to think over all that he had said, and to feel again the warm shining of his brown eyes; to thank God with a few, low, joyful exclamations that He had brought this friend into her life; and then, as foolish women will, she must look into her own face and try to see it as he saw it,—cheeks aglow, tremulous lips, and such a light in the blue eyes!

She did not know that her eyes could look like that. She had thought them pale, cold, meaningless, and now they were like no eyes that she had ever looked into; a dancing, tender, blue delight.

Had he read her secret in them?

Her enthusiasm with its newness, sweetness, and freshness,—for it was as fresh as her heart was pure,—was moulding all her thoughts, strengthening her desire to become in all things true and womanly, and making her as blithe all day long as the birds that twittered in the apple-tree near her chamber window.

It mattered not how her hands were busied so long as her heart could be full of him. And he, Ralph Towne, blind and obtuse as any man would be who lived among books and not in the world at all, and more than a trifle selfish, as men sometimes find themselves to be, little thinking of the effect of his chance visits and fitful attentions, had in the last two months come to a knowledge that grieved him; for he was an honorable man, he loved God and reverenced womankind. He had not time now to think of any thing but the book for which he was collecting material. It was something in the natural history line, he had once told her, but he never cared to speak of it; indeed Ralph Towne cared to talk but of few things; but she loved to talk and he loved to listen. He loved to listen to her, but he did not love her (so he assured himself), he only loved her presence, as he loved the sunshine, and he did not love the sunshine well enough to fret when the day was gloomy; in these days he did not love any body or any thing but himself, his books, and his mother.

Dunellen said that he was proud of his money and proud of a great-great-grandmother who had been cousin to one of the president’s wives; but Tessa knew that he was not proud of any thing but his beautiful white-haired mother.

Not understanding the signs of love, how could he know that Tessa Wadsworth was growing to love him; he had never thought of himself as particularly worth loving. Surely she knew a dozen men who were handsomer (if that were what she cared for), and another dozen who could talk and tell stories and say pretty things to women (if that were what attracted her); still he knew to-day that his presence and light talk (he did not remember that he had said any thing to be treasured) had moved her beyond her wont. She was usually only self-contained and dignified; but to-day there must have been some adequate cause for her changing color, for the lighting and deepening of her eyes as they met his so frankly; he was sure to-day of what he had only surmised before,—that this sensitive, high-spirited, pure-hearted woman loved him as it had never entered his preoccupied mind or selfish heart to love her or indeed any human being.

“I have been a fool!” he ejaculated. “Well, it is done, and, with a woman like her, it can not be undone! Miserable bungler that I am, I have been trying to make matters better, and I have made them a thousand times worse! Why did I promise to call again this week? Why did I give her a right to ask me? I wish that I had never seen her! God knows,”—she would never have forgotten his eyes could she have seen them at this instant, penitent and self-reproachful,—“that I did not mean to trifle with her.”

Meanwhile, resting in Dinah’s chair, with the algebra and slate at her feet, she was thinking over and over the words he had spoken that afternoon; very few they were, but simple and sincere; at least so they sounded to her. She smiled as “I do care very much” repeated itself to her, with the tone and the raising of the eyes.

“Very much!” as much as she did? It was about a trifle, some little thing that she had put into rhyme for him; how many rhymes she had written for him this summer! He so often said, “Write this up for me,” and she had so intensely enjoyed the doing it, and so intensely enjoyed his appreciation—his over-appreciation, she always thought.

O, Tessa, Tessa, pick up that algebra, and go to work with it. Life’s problems are too complex for your unworldliness.

She stooped to pick up Dinah’s slate, and, instead of finishing the work upon it, she wrote out rapidly a thought that had tinged her cheeks while Ralph Towne had been with her. The silent side she called it. Was it the silent side? If it were, how was it that he understood? She knew that he understood; she knew that he had understood when he answered, “Twice ten, perhaps.”

Her mother’s voice below broke in upon her reverie; fancy, sentiment, or delicate feeling of any kind died a hard and sudden death under Mrs. Wadsworth’s influence, yet she read more novels than did either of her daughters, and would cry her lovely eyes red and swollen over a story that Tessa would not deign to skip through. It was one of her mother’s plaints that Tessa had no feeling.

Ralph Towne did not give the promised “twice ten” minutes that week, nor for weeks afterward; she met him several times driving with his mother, or with his mother and Sue Greyson: her glad, quick look of recognition was acknowledged by a lifting of the hat and a “good afternoon, Miss Tessa.” Once she met him alone with Sue Greyson. Sue’s saucy, self-congratulatory toss of the head stung her so that she could have cried out. “I am ashamed”—no, I am not ashamed to tell you that she cried herself to sleep that night, as she asked God to bless Ralph Towne and make him happy and good. She could not have loved Ralph Towne if she might not have prayed for him. Her mother would have been inexpressibly shocked at such a mixture of “love and religion.”

“How long have you loved Christ?” asked the minister, when Tessa was “examined” for admission to the church.

“Ever since I have known Him,” was the timid reply.

And Ralph Towne, in these miserable days, for he was miserable, as miserable in his fashion as she was in hers, was blaming her and excusing himself. What had he ever said to her? Was every one of a man’s words to be counted? There was Sue Greyson, why didn’t she turn