The Amulet by Mary Noailles Murfree — Read

Those with whom life deals liberally are often less grateful than exacting. Any failure of the largess of fate is like withheld deserts or a wanton injury. It is as if they had an inalienable right to expect better usage. It never seems to occur to these favorites of fortune that others have as fair a claim upon the munificence of circumstance, and that but for a cloaked mystery of dispensation they would share equally with their fellows. Thus a disconcerting chance or a temporary obstacle rouses no disposition to measure strength with adversity, or to cope with untoward combinations, but an angry amazement, an indignant displeasure, a sense of trespass upon one's lawful domain of success and happiness that result in blundering egotistic self-assertion, which often fails in the clearance of the obstruction to the paths of bland and self-satisfied progress.

Mervyn, chancing to glance down from the block-house tower whither he had repaired shortly before sunset on his rounds, to see that the sentinels were properly posted and that they had the countersign correctly, was not only dismayed but affronted to perceive walking briskly up the slope from the river-bank Captain Howard, the quarter-master, the fort-adjutant, and following them at a leisurely pace Ensign Raymond, with Miss Howard on his arm. They were conversing earnestly; her face was full of interest as he spoke. Now and then she glanced up at him, as if with a question; the glow of the west rested in a transfiguring halo about her head, her golden hair showing beneath the dark green calash. In the setting of the bleak, cold day her face was as illumined as a saint's. A band of dull red was about the horizon above the sombre wooded mountains, promising fairer skies for the morrow, and now and then, through some translucence of the clouds a chill white sheen spread over the landscape less like sunlight than moonbeams. Still gazing at the two Mervyn marked that Arabella noted this aspect, and called her companion's attention to the abnormal quality of its glister.