A Crescent of a Girl
CHAPTER II
Graydon Muir
CHAPTER III
The Parting
CHAPTER IV
Effort
CHAPTER V
Achievement
CHAPTER VI
The Secret of Beauty
CHAPTER VII
Not a Miracle
CHAPTER VIII
Rival Girls
CHAPTER IX
The Meeting
CHAPTER X
Old Ties Broken
CHAPTER XI
"I Fear I Shall Fail"
CHAPTER XII
The Promptings of Miss Wildmere's Heart
CHAPTER XIII
"You Will Be Disappointed"
CHAPTER XIV
Miss Wildmere's Strategy
CHAPTER XV
Perplexed and Beguiled
CHAPTER XVI
Declaration of Independence
CHAPTER XVII
Not Strong in Vain
CHAPTER XVIII
Make Your Terms
CHAPTER XIX
An Object for Sympathy
CHAPTER XX
"Veiled Wooing"
CHAPTER XXI
Suggestive Tones
CHAPTER XXII
Disheartening Confidences
CHAPTER XXIII
The Filial Martyr
CHAPTER XXIV
"I'll See How You Behave"
CHAPTER XXV
Gossamer Threads
CHAPTER XXVI
Mrs. Muir's Account
CHAPTER XXVII
Madge's Story
CHAPTER XXVIII
Dispassionate Lovers
CHAPTER XXIX
The Enemies' Plans
CHAPTER XXX
The Strong Man Unmanned
CHAPTER XXXI
Checkmate
CHAPTER XXXII
Madge is Matter-of-Fact
CHAPTER XXXIII
The End of Diplomacy
CHAPTER XXXIV
Broken Lights and Shadows
CHAPTER XXXV
A New Experiment
CHAPTER XXXVI
Madge Alden's Ride
CHAPTER XXXVII
"You are Very Blind"
CHAPTER XXXVIII
"Certainly I Refuse You"
CHAPTER XXXIX
"My True Friend"
CHAPTER XL
The End of the Wooing
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"_Are you so bent upon winning her, Graydon?_"
_"There, now, be rational" cried the young girl_
_Her lips were parted, her pose, grace itself_
"_Promise me you will take a long rest_"
"_So you imagine I shall soon be making love to another girl?_"
CHAPTER I
A CRESCENT OF A GIRL
When Madge Alden was seventeen years of age an event occurred which
promised to be the misfortune of her life. At first she was almost
overwhelmed and knew not what to do. She was but a young and
inexperienced girl, and for a year or more had been regarded as an
invalid.
Madge Alden was an orphan. Four years prior to the opening of our
story she had lost her mother, her surviving parent, and since had
resided with her elder sister Mary, who was several years her
senior, and had married Henry Muir, a merchant of New York City. This
gentleman had cordially united with his wife in offering Madge a home,
and his manner toward the young girl, as far as his absorbed and busy
life permitted, had been almost paternal. He was a quiet, reticent
man, who had apparently concentrated every faculty of soul and body on
the problem of commercial success. Trained to business from boyhood,
he had allowed it to become his life, and he took it very seriously.
It was to him an absorbing game--his vocation, and not a means to some
ulterior end. He had already accumulated enough to maintain his family
in affluence, but he no more thought of retiring from trade than would
a veteran whist-player wish to throw up a handful of winning cards.
The events of the world, the fluctuations in prices, over which he had
no control, brought to his endeavor the elements of chance, and it was
his mission to pit against these uncertainties untiring industry and
such skill and foresight as he possessed.
His domestic life was favorable to his ruling passion. Mary Alden, at
the time of her marriage, was a quiet girl, whose early life had been
shadowed by sorrow. She had seen her father pass away in his prime,
and her mother become in consequence a sad and failing woman.
The young girl rallied from these early years of depression into
cheerfulness, and thoroughly enjoyed what some might regard as a
monotonous life; but she never developed any taste for the diversions
of society. Thus it may be surmised that Mr. Muir encountered no
distractions after business hours. He ever found a good dinner
awaiting him, and his wife held herself in readiness to do what
he wished during the evening, so far as the claims of the children
permitted. Therefore there were few more contented men in the city
than he, and the name of Henry Muir had become a synonym among his
acquaintances for methodical business habits.
In character and antecedents his younger brother, Graydon Muir, who
was also an inmate of his family, presented many marked contrasts to
the elder man. He had received a liberal education, and had graduated
at a city college. He had developed into one of the best products
of metropolitan life, and his defects were chiefly due to the
circumstances of his lot. During his academic course he had been known
as an athletic rather than a bookish man, and had left his Alma Mater
with an Apollo-like physique. At the same time he had developed fine
literary tastes, and was well informed, even if he had not gone very
deeply into the classics and the sciences that were remote from the
business career which he had chosen. After a brief interval of foreign
travel he had entered his brother's office, and was schooling his
buoyant, pleasure-loving temperament to the routine of trade. When
business hours were over, however, Graydon gave himself up to the
gratification of his social tastes. His vitality and flow of spirits
were so immense that wherever he went he always caused a breezy ripple
of excitement. Even veteran society girls found something exhilarating
in the mirthful flash of his blue eyes, and to be whirled through
a waltz on his strong arm was a pleasure not declined by reigning
belles. Many looks that to other men might have been the arrows of
Cupid were directed toward him, but they glanced harmlessly from
his polished armor. Society was to him what business was to his
brother,--an arena in which he easily manifested his power. At
the same time he was a manly fellow, and had no taste for corner
flirtations or the excitement of drawing perilously near to a
committal with those who would have responded to marked attentions.
The atmosphere he loved was that of general and social gayety. The
girls that he singled out for his especial regard were noted for their
vivacity and intelligence, as well as their beauty. Meanwhile he had
won a reputation for his good-natured attentions to "wall-flowers."
Such kindly efforts were rarely made at the promptings of conscience.
The truth was, he enjoyed life so fully himself that he disliked to
see any one having a dismal time. It gave him genuine pleasure to come
to a plain-featured, neglected damsel, and set all her blood tingling
by a brief whirl in a dance or a breezy chat that did her good, body
and soul, so devoid of satire or patronage was the attention. His
superb health and tireless strength, his perfect familiarity with the
usages of society, and his graceful decision of action made everything
he did appear as easy and natural as the beat of a bird's wing upon
the air, and in his large circle it was felt that no entertainment was
complete without his presence.
Graydon was still attending college when Madge Alden first became
associated with him in her home-life. She was then but thirteen, and
was small and slight for her age. The first evening when she came down
to dinner, shrinking in the shadow of her sister, lingered ever in her
memory. Even now it gave her pain to recall her embarrassment when she
was compelled to take her seat in the full blaze of the light and
meet the eyes of the one to whom she felt that she must appear so
very plain and unattractive. Clad in the deepest mourning, pallid
from grief and watching at her mother's bedside, coming from a life of
seclusion and sorrow, sensitive in the extreme, she had barely reached
that age when awkwardness is in the ascendant, and the quiet city
home seemed the centre of a new and strange world. One other thing she
remembered in that initial chapter of her life,--the kindly glances
that Graydon Muir bent on the pale crescent of a girl who sat opposite
to him. Even as a child she knew that the handsome young fellow was
not secretly laughing at or criticising her, and before dinner was
over she had ventured upon a shy, grateful glance, in reward for his
good-humored efforts to break the ice.
There had, in truth, been no ice to break. The child was merely like
a plant that had grown in the shade, and to her the strong, healthful
youth was sunshine. His smile warmed and vivified her chilled nature,
his hearty words and manner were bracing to her over-sensitive and
timid soul, and his unaffected, unforced kindness was so constant that
she gradually came to regard it as one of the best certainties of her
life. She soon learned, however, that behind his sunny good-nature
was a fiery and impatient spirit, ready to manifest itself if he was
chafed beyond a certain point, and so a slight element of fear was
mingled with her childlike affection.
He had sufficient tact to understand Madge's diffidence, and he knew
that their family life would soon banish it. He welcomed this pale
slip of a girl to their home circle because it gave him pleasure to
pet and rally such a wraith into something like genuine existence. He
also hoped that eventually she would become a source of amusement to
him. Nor was he disappointed. Madge's mind was not colorless, if her
face was, and she gradually began to respond to his mirthfulness, and
to take an interest, intelligent for a child, in what occupied his
thoughts. Kindness creates an atmosphere in which the most sensitive
and diffident natures develop and reveal themselves, and Madge Alden,
who might easily have been chilled into a reticent and dispirited
girl, eventually manifested an unusual versatility of fancy and
thought, acquiring also no slight power of expression.
Thus Graydon obtained his reward. His brother was a grave and silent
man, to whom few themes could be broached except those of business
and the events and politics of the day in their relation to trade. His
sister-in-law was absorbed in household and family cares, but Madge's
great black eyes responded with quick appreciation to all that he
said, and their merry nonsense often provoked a smile upon even the
face of Mr. Muir. The good-natured sympathy of the young man therefore
passed gradually into a genuine fraternal regard, and he rarely came
home of an evening without bringing flowers, bonbons, or some other
evidence that he had remembered her. Unconsciously to herself, he
became more to her than her sister, who was indulgent in the extreme,
but not very demonstrative. Her shyness disappeared, and his caresses
seemed as natural as those of an elder brother, in which light she
regarded him.
Thus time passed on, and the girl rapidly approached the stature of
womanhood. Apparently she grew too fast for her slight reserve of
physical strength. She nominally attended a fashionable school, but
was often absent from ill health, and for this reason her sister
permitted her to follow her own moods. Indolence and inanition
accounted largely for her lack of strength. Exercise brought
weariness, and she would not take it. Nothing pleased her more than to
curl up on a lounge with a book; and her sister, seeing that she was
reading most of the time, felt that she was getting an education. To
the busy lady a book was a book, a kind of general fertilizer of
the mind, and as Madge usually took cold when she went out, and was
assuredly acquiring from the multitude of volumes she devoured all
the knowledge a woman needed, she was safer in the evenly heated city
house. The sisters had independent fortunes of their own, and the
great point in Mrs. Muir's mind was that they should live and enjoy
them. If Madge was only sufficiently coddled now while she was
growing, she would get strong eventually; and so the good lady, who
had as much knowledge of hygiene as of Sanscrit, tempted the invalid
with delicacies, permitted her to eat the confectionery that Graydon
brought so often, and generally indulged a nature that needed wise and
firm development.
Thus Madge lived on, growing more pale and languid with each
succeeding year. The absence in the mountains and at the seashore
which Mr. Muir permitted to his family every summer brought changes
for the better, even though the young girl spent most of the time in a
hammock or reclining in the stern of a sail-boat. She could not escape
the invigoration caused by the mere breathing of pure air, but during
the winters in town she lost all and more than she had gained, and
sunk back into her old apathetic life.
This life, however, contained two elements which gave some color and
zest to her existence. All through the day she would look forward to
Graydon's return from business, and when she heard his latch-key the
faintest possible color would steal into her cheeks. Up-stairs, two
steps at a time, he would come, kiss her, waltz her about the room
with a strength which scarcely permitted her feet to touch the floor,
then toss her back on the lounge, where she would lie, laughing,
breathless, and happy. With a man's ignorant tolerance he accepted her
character as an invalid, and felt that the least he could do was
to brighten a life which seemed so dismal to him. When he came down
dressed for dinner or some evening engagement, she looked at him with
a frank, admiring pride that amused him immensely. When he returned
earlier than usual he often found her still upon the lounge with her
inevitable book, usually a novel, and then he would take her upon
his lap and call her his "dear little spook, the household ghost that
would soon cease to cast a shadow;" and she, with a languid curiosity,
would easily beguile from him a portrayal of the scenes through which
he had just passed. She cared little for them, but from his stores
of vitality and strength he imparted life to her, and without
understanding why, she simply knew she was happy.
Apart from her fondness for the unreal scenes presented by the
miscellaneous books she read--scenes all the more unreal because she
had no experience by which to correct them--she had one other taste
which promised well for the future--a sincere love of music. She was
taking lessons, but it was from a superficial teacher, who was content
to give her pretty and showy pieces; and she brought even to this
favorite study the desultory habits which characterized all her
efforts to obtain an education. When she sat down to her piano,
however, nature was her strong ally. Her ear was fine and correct, and
her sensitive, fanciful spirit gave delicacy and originality to her
touch. It scarcely seems possible for one to become a sympathetic
musician without a large degree of imagination and a nature easily
moved by thought and feeling. The young girl's thoughts and feelings
were as yet very vague, not concentrated on definite objects, and yet
so good a connoisseur as Graydon often acknowledged her power, and
would listen with pleased attention to her girlish rendering of music
made familiar to him by the great performers of the day. He enjoyed it
all the more because it was her own interpretation, often incorrect,
but never commonplace or slovenly; and when her fingers wandered among
the keys in obedience to her own impulses he was even more charmed,
although the melody was usually without much meaning. She was also
endowed with the rudiments of a fine voice, and would often strike
notes of surpassing sweetness and power; but her tones would soon
quaver and break, and she complained that it tired her to sing. That
ended the matter, for anything that wearied her was not to be thought
of.
Thus she had drifted on with time, unconscious of herself, unconscious
of the influences that would bring to pass the decisive events in
the future. She was like multitudes of others who are controlled by
circumstances of their lot until the time comes when a deep personal
experience applies the touchstone to character.