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Show THE FAIR APOSTATE CONTINUED. 339 maiden had undergone! Or was it really the same child he had known, and whose prattle had so greatly amused him during his con-valescence? It could not be, he thought, though the change had oc-curred before his eyes. No, she was no longer English ; she had the trim form, the delicate complexion, the arched instep, and the light tripping step of the American girl. She was obeying the climatic laws of sunny Utah, and not of foggy England. And thus have thousands of British parents in that Territory lost their children. For whether it be due more to climate, or to a change of fare, or to exemption from the severe toil and hard life of the poor in Europe, true it is that thousands of foreign- born female Saints, themselves short and stocky, find their daughters growing up in the American likeness ; and the young girls " coming on " in Utah are so much more handsome than the young girls just from Europe, that the Saints are bewildered, and the revelation for " celestial marriage" is often set at naught. But what was this other change which annoyed the young man so greatly, and puzzled more than it annoyed him ? Was not this his friend, the same girl who had run to welcome him ? Why should she now avoid him, or blush and shrink away when he spoke? True, she was older; but what is a woman, he thought, but a girl of larger growth? and why should the woman hate him when the girl had felt so grateful to him ? In all his experience he had seen nothing like it. To add to his troubles the poor fellow was lonesome. He had within him the gentle blood of that tall, hand-some, and loving man whom he could barely remember, and he could not assimilate with the rude society which was all he could find in the floating Gentile population. The brief period in which he had yielded to dissipation at Camp Floyd, he now looked back upon with disgust. He felt within himself a capacity for better things ; he grew shy and uncommunicative, and spent his leisure hours in reading or walking about the pleasant streets of the Mormon capital. Some-times he wildly resolved on a return to the States, and again that he would outfit with sonie of the parties going to the " new diggings," away up in the Blackfeet country. Then when another mood seized him, he would venture on another visit to the Briarlys ; and though he was sure there was nothing pleasant in the sour looks of the Mor-mon, or the sad silence of his " wives," and least of all in the shy avoidance of him by Marian, still he would go, because, as he thought, there was nowhere else to go. He pondered, and pondered again, upon the unpleasant change which seemed to have come over every body in whom he felt an interest, and his musings always ended in |
