PAGE 12
The Bushwhacker Nurse
by
For some little time the Daughter of the House had been speaking in a voice which grew lower and lower, and now she stopped. There were tears in her eyes, brought there by the story she herself was telling. John Gayther dropped his pea-stick and leaned forward.
“Now miss,” said he, “I really think your story is not quite right. You must have forgotten something–a good many things. Think it over, and I am sure you will agree with me that that is not the true ending.”
She looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean this,” replied the gardener. “If you will put your mind to it, and seriously consider the whole situation, I believe you will see, just as well as I do, that it really turned out very differently from the way you have just told it. That black-haired soldier did not go away in twenty minutes. It must have been somebody else at some other time who went away so soon. It would have been simply impossible for him to have done it. The longer he sat and looked at Miss Almia, the more he gazed into her beautiful eyes, the more fervently he must have thought that if it depended upon him he would never leave her, never, never again. And she, as she gazed into his handsome features, thrilling with the emotion he could not hide, must have known what was passing in his heart. It did not even need the words he soon spoke to make her understand she was the one thing in the world he loved, and that, in spite of sickness and obstacles of all sorts, he had come that day to tell her so. And when they had sat together for hours, and at last he was obliged to go, and they stood together, his impassioned eyes looking down into her orbs of heavenly blue, you know what must have happened, miss, now, don’t you, really? And isn’t this the true, true end of the story?”
The eyes of the Daughter of the House were sparkling; a little flush had come upon her cheeks, and a smile upon her lips.
“I do really believe that is the true ending, John,” said she; “but how did you ever come to know so much about such things?”
“I can’t tell you that, miss,” said the gardener; “but sometimes I notice things I cannot see, as when I look upon a flower bud not yet open and know exactly what is inside of it.”
With the smile still on her lips and the flush still on her cheeks, the Daughter of the House walked away through the garden. She had determined to make her story end sadly, but John Gayther had known her heart better than she knew it herself.