“What a beautiful idea!” said Hinpoha, carried away completely by the great love of Jasper Carver for his friend, so simply expressed in his diary.
“So that was Tad’s house, that we are living in!” said Sylvia excitedly. “I wonder where he is now.”
“Go on reading, Nyoda,” said Sahwah, consumed with interest in the tale. “See if he says anything about the shutter.” Nyoda passed on to the next entry.
“June 27, 1885. Went to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to hear Sylvia Warrington sing. She is the new singer from the South that has created such a furore. The Virginia Nightingale, they call her. What a God-gifted woman she is! There never was such a voice as hers. She sang ‘Hark, hark, the lark,’ and the whole house rose to its feet. She was Spring incarnate. Sylvia Warrington! The name itself is music. I cannot forget her. She is like a lark singing in the desert at dawning.”
A vague remembrance leaped up for an instant in Katherine’s mind and died as it came.
Nyoda read on through pages that recorded Uncle Jasper’s meeting with Sylvia Warrington; his great and growing love for her; his persistent wooing, her consenting to marry him; his wild happiness, which found vent in page after page of rapturous plans for the future. Then came the announcement of Tad’s return from a period of study abroad, and Uncle Jasper’s proud presentation of his bride-to-be. After that Tad’s name appeared in connection with every occasion, still the faithful David to his beloved Jonathan.
Then, almost without warning, the great friendship ran on the rocks and was shattered. For Tad no sooner saw Sylvia Warrington than he too, fell madly in love with her. A brief and bitter entry told how she finally broke her engagement to Uncle Jasper and married Tad, and how Uncle Jasper, beside himself with grief and disappointment, turned against his friend and hated him with the undying hate that is born of jealousy. With heavy strokes of the pen that cut the paper he wrote down his determination to have no more friends and to live to himself thereafter. Then, in a shaky hand in marked contrast to the fierce strokes just above, he wrote: “But Sylvia—I love her still. I can’t help it.” That shaky handwriting stood as a mute testimonial to his heart’s torment, and Nyoda, reading it after all these years, felt a sympathetic spasm of pain pass through her own heart at the sight of that wavering entry.