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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Ray How do you think Beltran will like it?" "I can't help what Beltran likes. I shall be doing God's work." "Beltran says God does His own work. He only requires of us our duty." "That is my duty." "You feel, Ray, as if you were possessed by the holy ardor of another Sir Galahad!" "I feel, Vivia, that I shall give what strength I have towards ridding the world of its foulest disease."
But Vivia only placed her warm hand on his, and said gently, "Ray, I love Beltran." There was a moment's quiet, while Ray looked away, supporting his chin upon one hand, and a black cloud sweeping torridly down the stern face. One sharp struggle. A moment's quiet. Into it a wild rose kept shaking sweetness. After it a vireo broke into tremulous melody, gushing higher, fuller, stronger, clearer.
In an instant, Ray, who might have escaped, has hurled himself upon them, and then, as they all struggle for one drowning breath in the flood, Vivia dimly divines through her horror an arm stretched first towards Ray, snatched back again, and bearing her to safety.
"Then you've the last thing he ever set his hand to, perhaps!" "Don't talk so, child!" said Vivia, with an angry shiver. "Come back! Where are you going?" "I enlisted, yesterday, in the Kansas Cavalry." "Great heavens, Ray! was there not another regiment in all the world than one to be sent down to New Mexico to meet Beltran and the Texan Rangers?" cried Vivia, wringing her hands.
Vivia, a slender little maiden of eleven summers, rocks in a boat a rod from shore, and by her side, his length along the warm wave, his arm along the boat, a boy floats in his linen clothes, an amphibious child, so undersized as to seem but little more than a baby, and yet a year her senior.
It was once more a morning of early June, sunrise was blushing over the meadows, and the gossamers of hoar dew lay in spidery veils of woven light and melted under the rosy beams. From her window one heard Vivia singing, and the strain stole down like the breath of the heavy honeysuckles that trellised her pane:
Vivia folded her work and disappeared; she was going to light a fire in her parlor, where there had been none yet, and where by-and-by in the evening shadows she might play to Ray, and charm him, perhaps, to rest. Mrs. Vennard divined her purpose, and hurried after her to join in the task. Ray found himself alone in his corner; he shivered.
Vennard, Ray's maternal aunt, a quiet widow, who was glad to receive her dying sister in her house a year and a half ago, as she had often received her boys before, and who was still willing to eke out her narrow income with the board of one nephew and any summer guest; and as that summer guest, owing to an old family-friendship that overlooked differences of rank and wealth, Vivia had, for many a season, been established.
Vivia would look back in triumph upon Ray in his ignoble conveyance, but the affair has already been too much for him, he has flung himself on the instant from old Disney's basket, as if he were careless whether he fell under the horse's feet or not, but knowing perfectly well that Beltran will catch him.
They sent a woman to prison this spring for eating an orange in the street. They confiscated a girl's wedding-gown the other day, and now they've confiscated her bridegroom. Oh, it's a great cause that can't get along without my wedding-gown! Noblesse oblige!" "It takes more wedding-gowns than yours, Vivia. Dips them in mourning." "Pray God it won't take mine yet!" cried she, with sudden fire.
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