The Argosy — page 384: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Prudence Hart. 363 him to the seventh heaven. But, as time went on, I am afraid the poor lad found that he had entered into rather a stormy paradise, and that if Miss Hart had disturbed his repose in the days before he declared himself to be her lover, she racked him with almost unbear- able torments in these other days that came after them. For he soon discovered that his expectation of receiving any extended favours from her hands after his elevation was a delusion of the most absolute kind. She gave him not more than she had given him before, but less. She treated him with brusquerie, with coldness, sometimes even with contempt: she made him jealous by parading her apparent preference of other people to himself; and when he reproached her with these cruelties she told him coolly that she practised them for his own good, that he might learn prudence, and wean his affections from her. ‘For you know you are very foolish to care about me,” she often told him, demurely. ‘‘ There are a great many other girls that it would be far better for you to like.” And she would enumerate these maidens sometimes, till she drove him wild with impatience. ‘“T will marry you, or no other woman in this world!” he told her one day, with vehemence. And then she laughed, and suddenly stopped her teasing talk, and, looking in his face with a softer look - in her eyes than she often let him see: “Well, I don’t think you will ever marry me,” she said, abruptly ; “but, if such an unlikely thing should by chance happen, I will try not to make you unhappy—you good old Keith.” And on this—for she gave him few such tender speeches—the foolish fellow was so moved that, feeling an entire inability to express his gratitude in words, he fairly went down on his knees before her, and kissed the little hands she gave up to him, with all kinds of in- coherent blessings stumbling over one another on his lips. And so, with little visible change, things went on till the summer had passed its height. Long before this, Prudence had made herself much at home in the Verner family, and had won a high opinion for her virtues from Mr. and Mrs. Verner alike. From Mabel she had, perhaps, not quite won so high an opinion, for Mabel’s acquaintance with her being more intimate, led now and then to certain suspicions that made that young lady doubtful about the innermost character of her new friend : yet even Mabel was attracted by her too much to be disposed readily to think ill of her. ‘‘It seems to me that she is not quite straightforward,” she had said, hesitatingly, once or twice to Keith (who, having his own thoughts, too, on that point, had not, perhaps, been able to do much to allay his sister’s per- plexity) ; but to her mother she had not said even so much as this. She was a kind-hearted girl, and hardly liked to hint at suspicions that she could not prove; “for if mamma thought there was any- thing odd about her she would never let her stay,” she argued, “ and it would seem so hard to send her away. Besides, I may be wrong, COMMICOOOKS.C©