such thoughts, Neelie?" said her sister, in a tone which, had it not been charged with so ranch depth of feeling, would have been plaintive. Her gray, profound eyes, from a slight slanting upward of the brows above them, took on an expression in harmony with her tone. "I never knew you to have such, until lately."
"I suppose, until lately, I didn't have any thoughts at all." There was a pause. Sophie looked away over the beautiful valley, but it could not drive the shadow of anxious and loving sorrow from her face. Cornelia busied herself selecting leaves from her basket, and arranging them in a bouquet. Like them, she was more vividly and variously beautiful since the frost.
"Do you think men's ideas of love, and such things, are as high as women's?" asked she presently.
"Why shouldn't they be?" answered Sophie, coming back from her reverie with a sigh. "I'm sure Bressant's are: if they weren't--"
She sank again into thought, and another long silence followed. This time Cornelia's hands were still, but she watched Sophie closely.
"Well--suppose they weren't--suppose he were to turn out not quite so high-minded, and all that, as you think him: you would stop loving him, wouldn't you?"
"Why do you suggest it!" cried Sophie, almost with a sob. She bent down, resting her face upon her arms, and against the rock. "That question has come to me once before. How can I know? If he were to degenerate now--now, after I have told him that I love him--it must be because he no longer loved me; and I should have no right to love him, then."
Cornelia looked down, for there was a certain light in her eyes which had no right to be there. When she thought it was subdued, she raised them again.
"Shouldn't you hate him always afterward? Shouldn't you want to kill him?" demanded she, in a low voice.
"I should want to kill only the memory of his unworthiness," replied Sophie, her voice rising and clearing, while she regarded her sister with a full, bright glance. "As to hating him--I cannot hate any one I have loved, Neelie." She raised herself up as she spoke, and sat erect.
"Well, you're a strange girl!" said Cornelia, who was a little confused. "I don't see how you can ever be either happy or unhappy. Nothing human seems to have any hold upon you."
"I'm very human," returned Sophie, shaking her head. "There are some things, I think, would soon drive me out of the world, if God wore to send them to me."
The idea of death, when brought home to Cornelia, never failed to affect her. If she had been planning the destruction of an enemy, she would have wept bitterly at the sight of that enemy's dead body; nay, even at a vivid account of his death. Sophie's words brought tears to her eyes at once, and a quaver into her voice.
"Don't--please don't talk that way, dear; it isn't so easy to die as you think, I'm sure. The idea of dying because anybody was wicked! It's only because you've been ill, and have got into the habit of expecting to die, that you have such ideas--isn't it? don't you think so? You'll stop feeling so as soon as you're well again--won't you?"
"Perhaps," said Sophie, with, it may be, a particle of satire in her smile.
They now got up from the rock and began to descend toward the Parsonage. Sophie stepped with a quick but careful precision, never slipping or missing her footing. Cornelia made short rushes, and daring jumps, often coining near to fall. Her mind was a Babel of new thoughts; or rather one idea spoke with many tongues, and made much disturbance.
The greatest crimes are often perpetrated by those who, in their own phrase, follow the lead of the moment, and let things take their course. Things never take their own course, in a certain sense; what we do, and say, and think, creates circumstances and shapes results. There seems always to be a choice of paths. We profess--and believe--that we are neutral; that we surrender ourselves to the chance of the current. But let an evil hope--a dangerous wish--once enter our minds: something we venture only half to hint to ourselves in the non-committal whispers of a craven, unacknowledged longing-working secretly within us, it will act upon our course as a rudder, which, hidden beneath the water, steers the vessel inevitably toward a certain goal. Perhaps, when the current has become too swift, and the rudder, clamped in one fatal position, cannot be turned, we may realize, and recoil; but now, indeed, we follow the lead of the moment; now, beyond a doubt, we let things take their course: we are hurried on irresistibly; that which we dared not openly to name, or fairly to face, now looms awfully above us--an irrevocable, accomplished fact.
Beyond doubt it would have been safer to have steadily and fearlessly kept the end in view from the outset: for the full horror of it would have been visible while yet there was time to change our minds. Few people have the nerve to jump from a precipice, or stand in way of a railway-engine, without first shutting their eyes, and perhaps their ears also.
In Cornelia's mind there was no intention of ruining her sister's happiness by interfering between her and Bressant; but then she did not think it likely that to lose him would occasion Sophie any thing more than a temporary and comparatively trifling degree of suffering. If she could allow her love for him to depend upon the immaculateness of his moral character, she did not love him as much as Cornelia, to whose affection any considerations of that kind were immaterial. What, after all, was Sophie's love but an idealization, which had, to be sure, taken Bressant as its object, but which placed no vital dependence upon him? But Cornelia's love was to her a matter of life and death: she was quite convinced that to live without Bressant would be an impossibility.
The next question was, whether Bressant was really as good as Sophie believed him to be. Cornelia did not think he was. Perhaps a secret sense of his attitude toward her suggested her suspicions; perhaps they were the result of her New-York experience, which had taught her just enough about men to make her imagine there was more or less of dark and indefinite villainy in the composition of all of them; perhaps it was her wish that fathered her moral misgivings about him--for it must be confessed that Cornelia was very far from shrinking at the idea of seeing her suspicions verified.
Indeed, was it not, on all accounts, desirable that, whatever objectionable points and passages the young man's life-record contained, should be at once forthcoming? Cornelia could not restrain a feeling of satisfaction at the growing conviction that it would be doing Sophie a kind and friendly service to inform her, in time, what a reprobate she was about to marry--if he only could be proved a reprobate! This question of proof was the only one difficulty in Cornelia's way; all the rest was as clear and easy as is generally the case in such matters.
It would not do to lie about it: Cornelia had a natural if not a moral disinclination to falsehood, and was, moreover, acute enough to see how strong, in this case, would be the chances of detection. It was not likely that Sophie would accept upon hearsay any imputations or accusations against her lover: she would speak to Bressant at once; the lie would be revealed, and the result would be not only a failure to alienate Sophie from him, but a certainty of alienating him from Cornelia.
No; her reliance must be placed upon facts. Whatever she could hear to the young man's disadvantage that was true, beyond the possibility of his denial, that she must at once make known to Sophie: it was no less than her duty. Or, better still, why would it not be enough simply to inform Bressant of her dark discovery, and compel him, by the threat of revelation, to give up Sophie of his own accord! Cornelia, in congratulating herself upon this shrewd idea, did not perceive how entirely it transformed the whole aspect and spirit of her intention.
So much being arranged, the next thing was to put herself in the way of learning the objectionable truths which she had persuaded herself existed. This was rather an awkward
