Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1886-07-02

N'n'inH+ iNa' .i' would H'"... y di.'''"t
visitor or S'li,. 1, schuo' 49,, .',.. .uphia 'al
always answered no; apj .nr i:.oi u,ypr i>.m
any rcn ON for this refusal
Whether She liked dancing. aud feared Tint
her pleasure might be restricted, or what rnnv
have been her reason, / cannot guess Even
when our rector tried to persuade her to help
him, her answer was still a simple no;
nor could the merry little clergyman
by any semi jocose questioning extract
from her a syllable more He turned
about and fried gravity and serious
remonstrance; but with no better result Ac
cordingly Mr.. Brent was somewhat sur
prised when, about six months after his sons
departure, Sophia asked him if she could be
Of any use to him in the parish or the Sunday
school or course he accepted her offer
gladly. And n capital teacher and punctual
visitor he found her But Mr. Brent noticed
that ut their various little meetings Sophia
would manage to linger until the other
ladies were gone then she would talk Il bit,
and somehow the talk always vecrnd about
till it settled on Percival, when Sophin would
ask few questions and be gone Even little
Mr. Brent, who was not an observer of things.
sometimes felt that these two or three little
sentences about Percival were with Sophia
the business of the day. At an earlier period
of his career he would have broken many
jest upon this discovery; but jests were by
cones with our poor rector The twinkle
had fallen from his eye and the blitheness
had sunk out of his tone. A pallor was steal
ing over his face, and he was fast turning
gray. As one of his parishioncrs who made
her living by laundry work said. He looked
like a gown that had been to the wash" the
colors had run; what remained was himself
and not himself
And now, disrcgardng for a moment our
small chro. olo2y, let me dismiss the rector
from this tale, where, indeed, he has little
more TO do.
Poor Sophia chung to him more than most
Of his Pensioners and She found real
pleasure in his society, because it seemed to
be kind of mote contact with Plciyal.
The bedroom y here Pcrcival he'd slept from
hoyhood vas in that house. The books he
had read were on the -hgvcs Here he used
to sit at dinner. There was the garden walk
where he was wont to sauntor with his pipe
She knew the very peg whore p!s hat used to
hang. Somehow he did not seem quite SO far
away VIII II She was in the precincts of his
own home and the rectors di,piritcd talk
had a certain livciness for her, because he
was Percivals father. Occasionally, too She
would get glimpse at her absent lad him
self For instance, one day, rs they were
walking together to the garden gate the
rector said:
Percy planted that rose"
Next week rs they went the same wav.
Sophia stopped beside the rose tree to pluck
off a few withered leaves and make the plant
look trim. Mr. Brent, stopping with her,
said in his distracted way:
Il never told you; Percival planted a.
rose
He never told her! Why, by that time She
knew how many leaves were on it, and could
spell its name and knew its prospect of life,
having become for P,rcivas sake a perfect
horticultural aCtuary.
Then another day the rector said listlcsslv
for he never joked with her about his son,
and indeed seemed to have only faint re-
membrane of that connection:
81 heard from Percy this morning: would
you care to hear his letter"
Sophia, who would have lived on bread and
water for a week rather thnn miss one line
her darling wrote, said, trying with miserable
affectation TO initiate the rector's apajhe
tone:
"Nes, if it is not troubling YOU
"PerhapS,' Mr.. Brent said, "as YOU don't
Seem greatly to care for it, we need not read
this one but wait for the next"
He said this quite nnocently but he put
Sophia in n dreadful fix. With the instinct
of true eeneralship, however. She resolved to
recover her lost position by bold stroke
Il would not miss hearing it for the world'
she said audariou>y. so. do read it,"
And the rector, looking up with faint
smile, like n man who remembers something,
took the letter out and read it through
In none Of these letters did Percy mention
her DDn1p until tbrpp vpor- f,,,. lii ,I.,.rt-
ure, when one day the rector read thi, line:
If yoU ercr see the giri Uho iruS once mn
httle sophia, gre her my Tore
He read il mechanically. as he did every
thing now; then, holding the letter with
loose fingers, it slipped from him and
SKINNED down under the table, and presently
he was called from the room. Sophia dropped
on her knees and caught the sheet up, and
read the line again:
"D you erer see the girl ichO icaS once nv
htte Sophia gire her my tore "
Bless me, how she kissed that sheet 1t got
all the love kisses that had been ripening on
her lips for six and thirty months, Had it
been the age of transformation, that sheet
would surely have turned into lover under
the transmitting power of those kisses And
then Miss Sophia, who had a terribly tender
conscience of her own, looked at the letter,
and colored up at a certain suggestion of her
own mind and wondered would it bc very
wrong, and would the rector ever find il out,
and was it very mean of her to do it in the
hope that ne would never find it out. And.
deciding on action. She nicely tore off the
lin 81 little morSrl of the paper, whore on the
last line these precious words were inscribed,
and she slipped the shred into her watch cast
where she could look at it night and morning
I,1 II tsff Tat Il.