Wired Love, Ella Cheever Thayer [best books for 20 year olds .TXT] 📗

not able to contain himself longer.

Rather afraid to draw out Cyn any more, Miss Kling gladly seized this opportunity to attack Clem.

"Young man, what right have you to interfere?" she inquired, majestically.

Clem bit his lip. Sure enough, what right had he?

He glanced at Nattie where she sat, pale and disturbed, at the scene that threatened to end seriously for her, and then, obeying a sudden impulse, seized the key at his side, and called,

"N—N—N!"

Nattie looked up quickly, and while Miss Kling, who supposed he was wantonly drumming on the obnoxious instrument to exasperate her, vented her indignation, and also the outraged feelings caused by the Torpedo-wound inflicted by Cyn, still rankling, in a wrathful homily to which no one listened, for Cyn was watching Clem curiously, he wrote rapidly, his eyes on the sounder,

"She says I have no right to interfere. If you had not so changed towards me—if I could hope you loved me as I have ever loved you, I would ask you to give me the right, and let me put this pernicious discredit to her sex on the other side of that door!"

As these words in dots and dashes came to her ears, Nattie, forgetting Miss Kling, forgetting everything, except that she loved Clem, and Clem declared—could it be possible—that he loved her, arose hastily, with a quick joy suffusing her face, and then their eyes met, and neither words or dots and dashes were needed. Love, more potent than electricity, required no interpreter, and that most powerful of all magnets drew them together. Before the face and eyes of the amazed Miss Kling, who had just delivered herself of a sentence intended to be crushing, and could not conceive why her victim should suddenly look so happy over it, he advanced to Nattie's side, clasped her hand eagerly and tenderly, then turning to Miss Kling, said, while Cyn, surmising the truth of the matter, embraced herself fervently,

"Miss Kling, any farther observations you may have to make, you will be good enough to say to me, hereafter; and now, will you oblige me by leaving the room?" and he politely held open the door.

"What?" gasped Miss Kling, hardly believing her own ears.

"I cannot allow you to annoy Miss Rogers, the lady who is to be my wife!" Clem added; "and if she and I choose to have twelve telegraph wires, we will. Let me bid you good-evening!" and he pointed significantly at the open door.

"Your wife! Miss Rogers!" echoed the discomfited Miss Kling, and glanced at the blushing Nattie, at Cyn, undisguisedly exultant, and at Clem, determinedly waiting for her to go out. This was something she had not expected, and it took her aback. So, with a sneeze, she drew herself up, gave a spiteful parting shot,

"Well, she has worked hard enough to get you—had to bring the telegraph to her assistance!" and then retreated, before Cyn could retaliate with the Torpedo. Retreated to her own room, to nurse her wrath and envy, and to dream hopelessly, forever more, of that other self, never to come nearer than now!

The discreet Cyn, comprehending that Miss Kling had brought about that, "crisis," and that something had been said on the wire to the right purpose, followed her out, and left them alone. It is hardly necessary to mention, that as soon as the door closed behind Cyn, Clem took Nattie in his arms and kissed her. It was an inevitable consequence.

"And now explain why you have treated me so, you contrary little girl?" he queried, tenderly.

"I thought," Nattie replied, raising her gray eyes, from which the shadows were all gone now, to his, "that you loved Cyn."

"You did!" he said, surprised and reproachful; "and that is why you have been so cold and distant! How could you?"

"But Cyn is so handsome, and—I do not see how you could help it!" pleaded Nattie in self-extenuation.

"Of course she is handsome, talented, brilliant fascinating, everything that is nice," Clem answered, "but," in a low voice, "Cyn was not my little girl at B m!"

Of course, after this there was another inevitable consequence, and then
Clem asked,

"And did you care because you imagined—you naughty, jealous girl—that
I loved Cyn?"

"Yes," Nattie answered, blushing, but honestly, "I was very unhappy, indeed I was, Clem! I think I loved you from the first—when you were invisible, you know!"

"And I," said Clem, "should have given myself up a victim to despair, like Quimby, if it had not been for one thing. Jo made me a duplicate of that picture you destroyed, and the fact that you never even mentioned the Cupid overhead gave me hope!" and his own roguish look was in his eyes as he saw Nattie's confusion, and laughing his merry laugh, he clasped her in his arms.

"I beg pardon," said Cyn tapping, and entering after a cautious interval, "But I come to inquire if Nat—I mean Nathalie—still thinks, as she did an hour ago, that Clem and I are just suited to each other?"

Nattie laughed and blushed.

"You see I set my heart on this from the beginning," said Cyn to Clem, not thinking it necessary to define to what "this" referred. "It was such a perfect romance, you know! and she has been frightening me by declaring that you were in love with me, and was so positive that she almost made me believe it, notwithstanding my natural sagacity!"

"As I certainly should have been," replied Clem gallantly, "only for a prior attachment. You see, I loved Nattie before ever I saw you! Why, I used to pass the most of my time when at X n in wondering what she was like, and wishing—I was as near her as I am now, for instance. And how miserable I was, when she dropped me so suddenly! and how happy I was when I came upon her at that blessed feast, and the red hair was all explained away. And then came another cross on the circuit of my true love."

"And had it not been for that dear Betsey Kling with her invectives we should have been mixed, and not had a cue now!" exclaimed Cyn. "I declare, I could hug her!"

But Betsey Kling not being available just then, she substituted Nattie, and gave her a most emphatic squeeze.

"It was your shot about the Torpedo that finished her, Cyn," laughed
Clem.

"It was effective, I flatter myself," Cyn confessed. "And that reminds me, you must not stay here now, Nat, you know; so I have seen Mrs. Simonson, and you are going to live with me—for the present"—glancing archly at her, "until that book is written, for instance."

"And it will be written, now, I know!" said Nattie, earnestly, her eyes shining. "You remember what you once said, Cyn? I see now you were right."

"Yes;" said Cyn, seriously, "and thank Heaven that it was love, and not disappointment, that came!"

"Love shall not come in vain!" Nattie said, as seriously. "I will be worthy of it!"

The after years only could prove her words. But in Clem's face the belief in them was written as plainly as if those future possibilities were acknowledged results.

"We must have another feast to celebrate events!" Cyn said then, gayly. "You are happy; my romance is O. K.; Celeste is ecstatic; Quimby as joyful as circumstances permit the victim of mistake to be; Jo and I are hopeful of future fame—and we certainly must have a feast!"

"With plenty of dishes this time," laughed Clem, "and there shall be no more crosses on the wire!"

"But bless my heart!" ejaculated Cyn, "here you two are making love like ordinary mortals"—at this Nattie hastily withdrew the hand Clem had taken— "Quimby and Celeste, for instance! This will never do! We must end this romance of dots and dashes as it commenced, to make it truly 'Wired Love!'"

"True enough! so we must!" answered Clem merrily, and rising, he went to the "key," with his eyes looking straight into Nattie's, and wrote something that made her blush and seize his hand in shy and unnecessary alarm, saying,

"Suppose Jo should be over in your room! He might be able to read it!"

"Very well," replied Clem, as he laughed and kissed her, regardless of the spectator. "I am quite content to make love like common mortals, Cyn, and I hope, my darling Nattie, that we are done now with all 'breaks' and 'crosses,' as we are with Wired Love. Henceforth ours shall be the pure, unalloyed article, genuine love!"

And Nattie, half-laughing, half-serious, but wholly glad, took the key and wrote, "O. K."

If any one is anxious to know what Clem wrote when Nattie stopped him, here it is.

MY LITTLE DARLING MY WIFE

[Transcriber's Note. The concluding three lines were printed in the American Railroad dialect of Morse. It cannot easily be represented in ASCII as it requires dashes of different lengths]

THE END

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