The Story Of Untold Love - Taschenbuch

THE SPORT 0F AN UNTOLD LGV-E PAUL LEICESTER FORD BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY PUBLISHERS NOTE WHEN Paul Leicester Fords Story of an Untold Love was first published in 1897, a sagacious critic writing for the Review of Re mews ventured an opinion that one was per fectly safe in assigning to it a permanent place in American literature. During subsequent years the book went through thirty-three printings, and its con tinued popularity has now led the publishers to issue it in a new edition. With Janice Meredith and The Honorable Peter Stir ling, The Story of an Untold Love has given Ford lasting fame as a novelist, while in other fields he proved himself a dis cerning biographer, a shrewd historian, and a bibliographer of conspicuous merit A quarter of a century after his death, Paul Leicester Ford is regarded, with Frank Morris, Stephen Crane, and Guy Wetmore Carryl, as one of the gifted writers of the THE STORY OF AN UNTOLD LOVE February 20, 1890. There is not a moment of my life that you have shared with me which I cannot recall with a dis tinctness fairly sunlit. My joys and my sorrows, my triumphs and my failures, have faded one by one from emotions into memories, quickening neither pulse nor thought when they recur to me while you alone can set both throbbing. And though for years I have known that if you enshnned any one in your heart it would be some one worthier of you, yet I have loved you truly, and whatever I have been in all else, in that one thing, ajt least, I have been strong. Nor would I part with my tenderness for you, even THE STORY OF though it has robbed me of contentment for all the pleasures of which I can dream cannot equal the happiness of lovingyou. To God I owe life, and you, Maizie, have filled that life with love and to both I bow my spirit in thanks, striving not to waste his gift lest I be unworthy of the devotion I feel for you. If I were a stronger man, I should not now be sobbing out my hearts blood through the tip of a pen. Instead of writing of my sorrow, I should have bat tled for my love despite all obstacles. But I am no Alexander to cut the knot of entanglements which the fates have woven about me, and so, Midas-like, 1 sit morbidly whispering the hidden grief, too great for me to bear in silence longer. I can pkture my first glimpse of you as vividly as my last. That dull rainy day of indoor imprisonment seems al most to have been arranged as a shadow box to intensify the image graved so deeply on my memory. The sun AN UNTOLD LOVE as you did, towards the end of the af ternoon, as if light and warmth were your couriers. When I shyly ejatered the library in answer to my fathers call, you were standing in the full jsunlight, and the thought flashed through my mind that here was one of the angels of whom I had read. You were only a child of seven, to others, I suppose, immature and formless yet even then your eyes were as large and as serious as they are to-day, and your curling brown hair had already a touch of fire, as if sunshine had crept thereinto, and, liking its abid ing-place, had lingered lovingly. Don, cried my father, as I stood hesitating in the doorway, here s a new plaything for you. Give it a welcome and a kiss. I hung back, half in shyness, and half in fear that you were of heaven, and not of earth, but you came forward and kissed me without the slightest hesita tion. The details are so clear that I3 THE STORY OF remember you hardly had to raise you Kead, though I was three years the older. Your kiss dispelled all my timidity, and from the moment of that caress I . loved you. Not that I am so foolish as to believe I then fdt for you what now I feel, but by the clear light of retrospect I can see that your coming brought a new element into my life, an element which I loved from the first, though with steadily deepening intensity, and I can not even now determine at what point a boys devotion became a lovers...