His love was returned.  He was blest!

“Susan,” he said, “my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every sacrifice.  Henceforth they will be my law.  Yes, I will stay and encourage my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field.  My voice shall urge them on to the battle-ground.  I will give my dearest breath to stimulate their ardor.

“O Susan!  My own, own Susan!”

While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest roof of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a similar conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars.  Clement Lindsay was so well received at his first visit that he ventured to repeat it several times, with so short intervals that it implied something more than a common interest in one of the members of the household.  There was no room for doubt who this could be, and Myrtle Hazard could not help seeing that she was the object of his undisguised admiration.  The belief was now general in the village that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were either engaged or on the point of being so; and it was equally understood that, whatever might be the explanation, she and her former lover had parted company in an amicable manner.

Love works very strange transformations in young women.  Sometimes it leads them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,—­their whole thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so as to keep out all other images.  Poor darlings!  We smile at their little vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with the last Congressman’s speech or the great Election Sermon; but Nature knows well what she is about.  The maiden’s ribbon or ruffle means a great deal more for her than the judge’s wig or the priest’s surplice.

It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast of Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself.  As the thought dawned in her consciousness that she was loved, a change came over her such as the spirit that protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had inherited, might have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow from angelic eyes.  She forgot herself and her ambitions,—­the thought of shining in the great world died out in the presence of new visions of a future in which she was not to be her own,—­of feelings in the depth of which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young eyes to them for a while seemed less than nothing.  Myrtle had not hitherto said to herself that Clement was her lover, yet her whole nature was expanding and deepening in the light of that friendship which any other eye could have known at a glance for the great passion.

Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw.  “There is no time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if this business is not put a stop to.”

Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings two young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an infinity between the moment when all is told and that which went just before.