He went away,--but he returned
the next day! He threatened once to commit suicide, left his clothes on
the bank of the river, and came home in another suit of clothes he had
taken with him. When I was sent abroad to school I lost sight of him;
when I returned he was at college, apparently unchanged. When he
came home for vacation, far from having been subdued by contact with
strangers, it seemed that his unhappy sensitiveness had been only
intensified by the ridicule of his fellows. He had even acquired a
most ridiculous theory about the degrading effects of civilization, and
wanted to go back to a state of barbarism. He said the wilderness was
the only true home of man. My father, instead of bearing with what
I believe was his infirmity, dryly offered him the means to try his
experiment. He started for some place in Texas, saying we would never
hear from him again. A month after he wrote for more money. My father
replied rather impatiently, I suppose,--I never knew exactly what he
wrote. That was some years ago. He had told the truth at last, for we
never heard from him again."
It is to be feared that John Milton was following the animated lips and
eyes of the fair speaker rather than her story. Perhaps that was the
reason why he said, "May he not have been a disappointed man?"
"I don't understand," she said simply.
"Perhaps," said John Milton with a boyish blush, "you may have
unconsciously raised hopes in his heart--and"--
"I should hardly attempt to interest a chronicler of adventure like you
in such a very commonplace, every-day style of romance," she said,
with a little impatience, "even if my vanity compelled me to make such
confidences to a stranger.
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