darling; I couldn't flare up all of a sudden in the face of that poor
little creature; he looked so absurd--and so--so honest."
Christie turned away, relapsing into her old resigned manner, and
assuming her household duties in a quiet, temporizing way that was,
however, without hope or expectation.
Mr. Carr, who had dined with his friends under the excuse of not adding
to the awkwardness of the first day's housekeeping returned late at
night with a mass of papers and drawings, into which he afterwards
withdrew, but not until he had delivered himself of a mysterious package
entrusted to him by the young men for his daughters. It contained a
contribution to their board in the shape of a silver spoon and battered
silver mug, which Jessie chose to facetiously consider as an affecting
reminiscence of the youthful Kearney's christening days--which it
probably was.
The young girls retired early to their white snow-drifts: Jessie not
without some hilarious struggles with hers, in which she was, however,
quickly surprised by the deep and refreshing sleep of youth; Christie to
lie awake and listen to the night wind, that had changed from the first
cool whispers of sunset to the sturdy breath of the mountain. At times
the frail house shook and trembled. Wandering gusts laden with the
deep resinous odors of the wood found their way through the imperfect
jointure of the two cabins, swept her cheek and even stirred her long,
wide-open lashes. A broken spray of pine needles rustled along the roof,
or a pine cone dropped with a quick reverberating tap-tap that for an
instant startled her. Lying thus, wide awake, she fell into a dreamy
reminiscence of the past, hearing snatches of old melody in the moving
pines, fragments of sentences, old words, and familiar epithets in the
murmuring wind at her ear, and even the faint breath of long-forgotten
kisses on her cheek. She remembered her mother--a pallid creature, who
had slowly faded out of one of her father's vague speculations in a
vaguer speculation of her own, beyond his ken--whose place she had
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