"How could
I ever have loved you?"
She dressed absent-mindedly. How should she spend the forenoon?
Some of her friends would be coming to talk over the party; there
would be callers; there was the summer-house, her hammock, her
phaeton; there were nooks and seats, cool, fragrant; there were her
mother and grandmother to prattle to and caress. "No," she said,
"not any of them. One person only. I must see _him_."
She thought of the places where she could probably see him if he
should be in town that day. There was only one--the library.
Often, when there, she had seen him pass in and out. He had no
need to come for books or periodicals, all these he could have at
home; but she had heard the librarian and him at work; over the
files of old papers containing accounts of early agricultural
affairs and the first cattle-shows of the state. She resolved to
go to the library: what desire had she ever known that she had not
gratified?
When Marguerite, about eleven o'clock, approached the library a
little fearfully, she saw Barbee pacing to and fro on the sidewalk
before the steps. She felt inclined to turn back; he was the last
person she cared to meet this morning. Play with him had suddenly
ended as a picnic in a spring grove is interrupted by a tempest.
"I ought to tell him at once," she said; and she went forward.
He came to meet her--with a countenance dissatisfied and
reproachful. It struck her that his thin large ears looked
yellowish instead of red and that his freckles had apparently
spread and thickened.
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