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Updated: October 8, 2025
Ah, me! with what regret I used to look back to this quiet town, and the stately calm of Oaklands, after one of our vulgar quarrels. I learned too soon that my husband was a gambler, and that my fortune had been a more coveted prize than myself; but fortunately, neither of us could touch anything but the interest until my eldest child should come of age.
He found her in the kitchen, tying the covers upon countless jars of currant jam. She looked surprised to see him back at such an hour, but said nothing, as Esther Nichols was close by, employed in wiping off the jars. "I'm going over to Oaklands for a drive," he said, handing her the scrap of newspaper with a gesture that meant silence.
Winthrop persist in making me out a child. When will I be a woman?" "Not till your heart gets wakened." "I wonder when that will be. Does it mean love and marriage, Mrs. Flaxman?" "It means the former; the latter may not follow with you." "Why not? But there, I do not want to leave you and Mr. Winthrop and Oaklands. No man could tempt me from you.
On the opposite side of the beach-plum alley, the Bradfords have made preparations for autumn glory, such as we always drive down to the marsh lands from Oaklands not only to see but to gather and take home. Masses of the fleshy tufted seaside goldenrod, now just beginning to throw up its stout flowerstalks, flank a bed of wild asters twenty feet across.
James Drane was often at Oaklands, and Abner, aware of this, while he, Betsy's betrothed husband, was prohibited from visiting her, grew more and more moody and impatient, and sometimes in his despondency he pictured the girl as listening with growing interest to Drane's entertaining talk, and yielding more and more to his fascination.
For some time he kept aloof from Oaklands; not only because of Abby, but because, when in Betsy's presence, certain tones of her voice when speaking to him, and a wistful look in her eyes, troubled him with a vague, half-conscious sense that she, young though she was, comprehended his trouble.
He had at first intended to go to Oaklands village to see Miss Lavinia and gather such tidings as he could of the calamity that had overtaken Sylvia; for he never for a moment questioned but that the girl, who had been entirely straightforward, even in days of college pranks, should so regard the matter.
In the woods at Oaklands, whither father went once or twice a week to have an eye upon his improvements and preparations for the summer, spring-beauties, hepaticas, and anemones, and even a few early violets, were showing their lovely faces; and all young things ah, and the older ones too were rejoicing that the "winter was past and gone."
A keen sense of my own heartlessness in feeling so happy within touch of such woe came over me, while a vague wonder seized me, if some other careless-hearted creatures might not be planning their joys some day in presence of my breaking heart. I was rapidly attaining the comfortable home feeling at Oaklands, which makes life in castle or hut a rapture.
Then the conversation drifted easily along to Miss Lavinia, and my meeting with Horace, his professorship, the prospect of his being at home all summer, and to the different changes in the community, especially that wrought by the colony at the Bluffs, which were really the halfway mark between Oaklands and Pine Ridge. Mrs.
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