“I have distressed you, Georgiana!” I cried, “and my only thought had been to give you pleasure.  I am always doing something wrong!”

She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow, as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares.  Then she sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap.

“You have shared your secret with me,” she said, solemnly, at length.  “I’ll share mine with yon.  It is the only fear that I have ever felt regarding our future.  It has never left me; and what you have just shown me fills me with terror.”

I sat aghast.

“I am not deceived,” she continued; “you have not forgotten nature.  It draws you more powerfully than anything else in the world.  Whenever you speak of it, you say the right thing, you find the right word, you get the right meaning.  With nature alone you are perfectly natural.  Towards society you show your shabby, awkward, trivial, uncomfortable side.  But these drawings, these notes—­there lies your power, your gift, your home.  You truly belong to the woodsmen.”

Never used to study myself, I listened, to this as to fresh talk about a stranger.

“Do you not foresee what will happen?” she went on, with emotion.  “After we have been married a while you will begin to wander off—­at first for part of a day, then for a day, then for a day and a night, then for days and nights together.  That was the way with Audubon, that was the way with Wilson, that is the way with Thoreau, that will be the way with all whom nature draws as it draws you.  And, me—­think of me—­at home!  A woman not able to go with you!  Not able to wade the creeks and swim the rivers!  Not able to sleep out in the brown leaves, to endure the rain, the cold, the travel!  And, so I shall never be able to fill your life with mine as you fill mine with yours.  As time passes, I shall fill it less and less.  Every spring nature will be just as young to you; I shall be always older.  The water you love ripples, never wrinkles.  I shall cease rippling and begin wrinkling.  No matter what happens, each summer the birds get fresh feathers; only think how my old ones will never drop out.  I shall want you to go on with your work.  If I am to be your wife, I must be wings to you.  But think of compelling me to furnish you the wings with which to leave me!  What is a little book on Kentucky birds in comparison with my happiness!”

She was so deeply moved that my one desire was to uproot her fears on the spot.

“Then there shall be no little book on Kentucky birds!” I cried.  “I’ll throw these things into the fire as soon as I go home.  Only say what you wish me to be, Georgiana,” I continued, laughing, “and I’ll be it—­if it’s the town pump.”

“Then if I could only be the town well,” she said, with a poor little effort to make a heavy heart all at once go merrily again.