sat on the back steps, peeling potatoes for dinner. On the step by her side was a large earthen bowl, into which she put the potatoes, while throwing the skins into the swill-pail on her right. She was obliged to give her whole mind to the operation, there being a danger lest, in rapid working, she should happen to throw the potato into the swill-pail, and put the skin into the earthen bowl. She was much too absorbed to notice the beautiful weather, even had she been inclined to do so; but it remained beautiful, nevertheless.
"I'd be a fool to find fault with him," said Abbie to herself. "How can I expect him to see any thing in me, more than I can see myself in the looking-glass? And then, he loves Sophie, and perhaps he thinks I'd rob her; the Lord knows I only coveted the luxury of giving away my own, and seeing them happy with it. Well, he may set his mind at rest; he shall never suffer the mortification of having to thank a boarding-house keeper for his fortune.
"O my boy--my dear, dear boy!"
Meanwhile Bressant, having been relieved, by the timely arrival of the letter, from any present necessity of visiting his aunt, was devoting himself pretty diligently to the cultivation of that line in his forehead running perpendicularly up from between the eyebrows. It bade fair to become a permanent feature in his face.
CHAPTER XXIII.
ARMED NEUTRALITY.
One afternoon in the cool heart of October, Cornelia and Sophie found themselves on the hill which rose up in front of the house, above the road, bound on a hunt for autumn leaves. They were alone. Bressant's time for coming was still an hour distant. A few nights before there had been a frost, which had inspired a rainbow soul into the woods; and the glory of the golden and crimson leaves made it imperatively necessary that they should be gathered and allowed to illuminate the dusky interior of the Parsonage.
Since Cornelia's return home, the sisters had not been so much together as formerly. Sophie had observed it, and secretly blamed herself: she allowed Bressant to monopolize her--left Cornelia out in the cold--was selfish and thoughtless just because she was happy--and so forth: taking herself severely to task, and resolving to amend her behavior forthwith. But there seemed to be some difficulty in the way of consummating her best intentions.
Cornelia was no longer so easily to be come at; she did not volunteer herself now in the liberal, joyous way she used to do; did not, in fact, appear half so ready to do her share in the work of reconstruction. It began to force itself upon Sophie that the edifice of their former relations was not lightly to be rebuilt; and the growth of this conviction occasioned her to mar her ordinarily serene and justly harmonized existence with sundry little fits of crying and other mournful indulgences.
As for Cornelia, if she noticed the estrangement at all, she did not allow it to occasion her any anxiety. Jealousy and discontent are more self-absorbing passions than love, and they closed her eyes to whatever they did not involve. Yet the effect of the estrangement was more hurtful upon her than upon Sophie; for never had her pure-minded sister's influence been so needful to her as now, when the very nature of the malady forbade its being so relieved.
But this afternoon it had so happened that they found themselves together, on the hill. Each had filled a basket with the most brilliant, or harmonious, or vividly contrasted colors they could find. They had emerged from the wood into the clear autumn sunshine which rested upon the hill-side, and sat down upon a gray knee of rock, encased with crisp gray and black lichens. Below lay the Parsonage, with its weather-blackened, shingled roof, and the garden, full of shrubbery, intersected by winding paths, the fountain in the centre. The stony road wound around the spur of the hill, and was visible here and there, in its slopes and turnings on the way to the village, light buff between the many-colored bordering of foliage. The winding valley looked like Nature's color-box; the tall hills beyond, sleeping beneath their Persian shawls, contrasted richly with the cool pearl-gray of the lower sky behind them. Away to the right, though seemingly nearer than from the road below, rose the white steeple of the meeting-house, and, peeping out around it, the roofs and gable-ends of the village houses.
"There could not be a more lovely place to be happy in!" said Sophie, sighing from excess of pleasure.
"Any place is as lovely as another when you're in love, I suppose," remarked her sister; "that is, if being in love is as nice as poets say it is."
Sophie looked around with a smile, implying that the best description a poet ever wrote could give but a faint impression of the reality.
"But," pursued Cornelia, "don't you find it very stupid when he's away? The happier you are with him, the unhappier you'd be without him, I should think."
"Oh, no, dear!" returned Sophie. "I'm happy mostly, because I know he cares for me more than for any one else in the world, and because I know he's one of the best and truest of men. I can feel that, you know, just as much when he's at Abbie's, as when he's here. The happiness of love isn't all in seeing and hearing, and--all that tangible part."
"Don't it make any difference, then, if you never Bee one another from the day you're engaged until you're married?"
Sophie began to blush, as she generally did when called upon to speak of her love. "Of course, it's delicious to be together," said she, "and it would be very sad if we could not meet. But it would be more sad to think that our love depended on meeting."
"Well, it may be so to you," returned Cornelia, picking lichens from the rock and crushing them between her rounded fingers; "but my idea is that the whole object of being engaged and married is to be together all the time. I don't see what on earth we are made visible and tangible for, unless to be seen and touched by the persons we love."
Sophie looked distressed, and a little embarrassed.
"You can't think our bodies are the most important part of us, Neelie, dear? It's our souls that love and are loved, you know. How could we love in heaven if it were not so?"
"Oh, I don't know any thing about that. It's love in this world I'm speaking of. I believe it has as much to do with flesh and blood, as an instrument has with the music that it makes. What would become of the music if it wasn't for the instrument?"
"That's a beautiful illustration, my dear," observed Sophie, after a thoughtful pause, "but I think it can be used better the other way. The music of love, like other music, is an existence by itself, exclusive of the flesh-and-blood instruments, which weren't given us to create music, but to interpret it to our earthly senses. Our souls are the players; but in the next world we shall be able to perceive the harmony without need of any medium. We can remember music, too, and enjoy it, long after we have heard it--that is why we don't need to be always together. And yet it's always sweet to meet, to hear a new tune; and the number of tunes is infinite; so love needs all eternity to make itself complete."
When Sophie hit upon an idea which seemed to her spiritually beautiful and harmonious, she was apt to be carried away--sometimes, perhaps, into deep water. Yet thus, occasionally, did she catch glimpses of higher truths than a broader and safer wisdom could have attained. Cornelia took one of the glowing leaves out of her basket, and looked at it. Perhaps she saw, in the perfect earthly self-sufficiency of its splendor, something akin to herself.
"I suppose I don't half appreciate your theory, Sophie, though it's certainly pretty enough. But you're more soul than body, to begin with, I believe. For my part, I almost think, sometimes, I could get along without any soul at all, and never feel the least inconvenience. Perhaps everybody hasn't a soul--only a few favored ones."
"What is it gives you
