Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/136

pose, nay, even the desire to ask Fanny Lane to be his wife was slain, as we have said, in an instant by the sight and the sense of the Fanny Lane whom he had never seen, never known, till he saw and knew her in her city splendors. But there remained still the memory, the consciousness of the other Fanny Lane whom he had seen and had known during all those long, sweet, bewildering summer hours. This memory and this consciousness were not so easily slain. They died hard, and John was, for many months, a man bereft. If there had been in the Deerway grave-yard a mound under which he had laid away the dead body of a woman he had loved, his sense of loss would not have been much greater. The winter was a long and cold and sunless one. If it had been summer, John's loneliness would have been far less; nature would have helped to cure him through every pore, and every nerve; but the New England winter is a bitter season in which to be shut up alone with a grief; it takes a serene and ever-abiding joy to reconcile one to its imprisoning cold. The months seemed very long to John. They seemed very long to Molly Wilder also. The instinct of love is like the subtle added sense by which the blind know the presence or the approach of a person they can neither see, nor hear, nor touch. What had happened to John, Molly did not know, could not imagine; but that something had changed him, she felt so keenly, that she could hardly keep back