But his passion had
never presumed to hope, and the girl was of too true a sort ever to thrust
hope upon him. What his love lacked in courage it made up in constancy,
however, and morning, noon, and night--sometimes midnight too, I venture
to say--his all too patient heart had bowed mutely down toward its holy
city across the burning sands of his diffidence. When another fellow
stepped in and married her, he simply loved on, in the same innocent,
dumb, harmless way as before. He gave himself some droll consolations. One
of these was a pretty, sloop-rigged sail-boat, trim and swift, on which he
lavished the tendernesses he knew he should never bestow upon any living
she. He named her Sweetheart; a general term; but he knew that we all knew
it meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I met
him oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's sidewalk
chat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze of his fine
skin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while certain
changes began to show for the worse, until one day in the summer of the
fifth year he tried to hurry by me. I stopped him, and was thinking what a
handsome fellow he was even yet, with such a quiet, modest fineness about
him, when he began, with a sudden agony of face, "My schooner's sold for
debt! You know the reason; I've seen you read it all over me every time we
have met, these twelve months--O _don't_ look at me!"
His slim, refined hands--he gave me both?-were clammy and tremulous.
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