Paula
“The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face.”
A wintry scene. Snow-piled hills stretching beyond a frozen river. On the bank a solitary figure tall, dark and commanding, standing with eyes bent sadly on a long narrow mound at his feet. It is Edward Sylvester and the mound is the grave of his mother.
It is ten years since he stood upon that spot. In all that time no memories of his childhood’s home, no recollection of that lonely grave among the pines, had been sufficient to allure him from the city and its busy round of daily cares. Indeed he had always shrunk at the very name of the place and never of his own will alluded to it, but the reveries of a night had awakened a longing that was not to be appeased, and in the face of his wife’s cold look of astonishment and a secret dread in his own heart, had left his comfortable fireside, for the scenes of his early life and marriage, and was now standing, in the bleak December air, gazing down upon the stone that marked his mother’s grave.
But tender as were the chords that reverberated at this sight, it was not to revisit this tomb he had returned to Grotewell. No, that other vision, the vision of young sweet appreciative life has drawn him more strongly than the memory of the dead. It was to search out and gaze again upon the innocent girl, whose eloquent eyes and lofty spirit had so deeply moved him in the past, that he had braved the chill of the Connecticut hills and incurred the displeasure of his wife.