Love"s Progress
Price 17.88 - 17.99 USD
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXX. Trenton Falls. Mr. Raymond grasped Ruth"s arm with unconscious roughness, and hurried her on, now looking about with a wild air of expectation, and then laughing with a childish vacancy. As the full moonlight shone on his features, his anxious child saw a change from their recent expression of tender regard, to the hard, cold tone which had characterized them in his period of excitement. They were not yet marked by hate; thank God, he loved her still; but the maniac began to be devel. oped more distinctly; and when she saw that, as a tear dropped on his hand from her eyes, he held it up to the moonbeams, and laughed, and cried "Hurra!" she knew that sympathy was gone. She felt that she stood beneath a lava mountain, heaving to its explosion; but the Christian habit of her mind referred all things to a presiding Deity; and when her eyes had turned upward a moment, and her lips moved in almost involuntary prayer, her fluttering heart grew calm. Something of joy, too, played over her troubled spirit, at the idea of Clarendon"s vicinity; it seemed as if another Provi. dence was watching over her. And what felt that covert wanderer, as he saw the flutter of her garments, and remembered the pressure of her trembling form? The moonlight glory was no longer sought for inspiration; the mountains uplifted their noble heights unheeded, for the fair vision of his heart was before him, in her youth and loveliness. "And now Ruth and her father are once more on their bright and beautiful Hudson, while the boat treads her way like an untried courser. He was comparatively calm, and nature, like a sweet restorer, healed her wounded heart. The blue, massy hills, as they heaved heavenward, lent her a kinder strength and engendered a lofty repose; a trust that He...