CHAPTER XIX.

“I, REX, TAKE THEE, BERTHA.”

The words were said in the old Homestead about a year from the time when

we first saw Bertha walking along the lane to meet her sister and

holding in her hand the newspaper which had been the means of her

meeting with Rex Hallam. The May day had been perfect then, and it was

perfect now. The air was odorous with the perfume of the pines and the

apple-blossoms, and the country seemed as fresh and fair as when it

first came from the hands of its Creator. The bequest which Fred had

made to Bertha, and which he wished he had doubled, had been quadrupled

by Louie, who, when Bertha declined to take so much, had urged it upon

her as a bridal present in advance. With that understanding Bertha had

accepted it, and several changes had been made in the Homestead, both

outside and in. Bertha’s room, however, where Rex had once slept,

remained intact. This he insisted upon, and it was in this room that he

received his bride from the hands of her bridesmaids. It was a very

quiet affair, with only a few intimate friends from Worcester and

Leicester, and Mrs. Hallam from New York. Bertha had suggested inviting

Mrs. Haynes, but Rex vetoed that decidedly. She had been the direct

cause of so much humiliation to Bertha that he did not care to keep her

acquaintance, he said. But Mrs. Haynes had no intention to be ignored by

the future Mrs. Rex Hallam, and one of the handsomest presents Bertha

received came from her, with a note of congratulation. Louie and Phineas

were master and mistress of ceremonies, Louie inside and Phineas

outside, where he insisted upon caring for the horses of those who drove

from Worcester and the village.

He’d “smile if he couldn’t do it up ship-shape,” he said, and he came at

an early hour, gorgeous in swallowtail coat, white vest, stove-pipe hat,

and an immense amount of shirt-front, ornamented with Rhine-stone studs.

In his ignorance he did not know that a dress-coat was not just as

suitable for morning as evening, and had bought one second-hand at a

clothing-store in Boston. He wanted to make a good impression on Lucy

Ann, he said to Grace, who had been at the Homestead two or three days,

and who, declaring him a most delicious specimen, had hobnobbed with him

quite familiarly. She told him she had no doubt he would impress Lucy

Ann; and he did, for she came near fainting when he presented himself to

her, asking what she thought of his outfit, and how it would “do for

high.” She wanted to tell him that he would look far better in his

every-day clothes than in that costume, but restrained herself and made

some non-committal reply. Since meeting him on the ship she had had time

to reflect that no one whose opinion was really worth caring for would

think less of her because of her relatives, and she was a little ashamed

of her treatment of him. Perhaps, too, she was softened by the sight of

the old homestead, which had been her husband’s home, or Grace Travis’s

avowal that she wished she had just such a dear codger of a cousin,

might have had some effect in making her civil and even gracious to the

man who, without the least resentment for her former slight of him,

“Cousin Lucy Ann”-ed her continually and led her up to salute the bride

after the ceremony was over.

There was a wedding breakfast, superintended by Louie, who, if she felt

any regret for the might-have-been, did not show it, and was bright and

merry as a bird, talking a little of Fred and a great deal of Charlie

Sinclair, whom business kept from the wedding and whose lovely present

she had helped select. The wedding trip was to extend beyond the Rockies

as far as Tacoma, and to include the Fair in Chicago on the homeward

journey. The remainder of the summer was to be spent at the Homestead,

where Rex could hunt and fish and row to his heart’s content, if he

could not have a fox-hunt. Both he and Bertha wished a home of their own

in New York, but Mrs. Hallam begged so hard for them to stay with her

for a year at least that they consented to do so.

“You may be the mistress, or the daughter of the house, as you please,

only stay with me,” Mrs. Hallam said to Bertha, of whom she seemed very

fond.

Evidently she was on her best behavior, and during the few days she

stayed at the Homestead she quite won the hearts of both Mr. Leighton

and Dorcas, and greatly delighted Phineas by asking him to spend the

second week in July with her. In this she was politic and managing. She

knew he was bound to come some time, and, knowing that the most of her

calling acquaintance would be out of town in July, she fixed his visit

at that time, making him understand that he could not prolong it, as she

was to join Rex and Bertha in Chicago on the 15th. Had he been going to

visit the queen, Phineas could not have been more elated or have talked

more about it.

“I hope I sha’n’t mortify Lucy Ann to death,” he said, and when in June

Louie came for a few days to the Homestead, he asked her to give him

some points in etiquette, which he wrote down and studied diligently,

till he considered himself quite equal to cope with any difficulty, and

at the appointed time packed his dress-suit and started for New York.

This was Monday, and on Saturday Dorcas was surprised to see him walking

up the avenue from the car.

He’d had a tip-top time, he said, and Lucy Ann did all she could to make

it pleasant.

“But, my!” he added, “it was so lonesome and grand and stiff; and didn’t

Lucy Ann put on the style! But I studied my notes, and held my own

pretty well. I don’t think I made more than three or four blunders. I

reached out and got a piece of bread with my fork, and saw a

thunder-cloud on Lucy Ann’s face; and I put on my dress-suit one morning

to drive to the Park, but took it off quicker when Lucy Ann saw it.

Dress-coats ain’t the thing in the morning, it seems. I guess they ain’t

the thing for me anywhere. But my third blunder was wust of all, though

I don’t understand it. Between you ’n’ I, I don’t believe Lucy Ann has

much company, for not a livin’ soul come to the house while I was there,

except one woman with two men in tall boots drivin’ her. Lucy Ann was

out and the nigger was out, and I went to the door to save the girls

from runnin’ up and down stairs so much. I told her Mis’ Hallam wa’n’t

to home, and I rather urged her to come in and take a chair, she looked

so kind of disappointed and tired, and curi’s, too, I thought, as if she

wondered who I was; so I said, ‘I’m Mis’ Hallam’s cousin. You better

come in and rest. She’ll be home pretty soon.’

“‘Thanks,’ she said, in a queer kind of way, and handed me a card for

Lucy Ann, who was tearin’ when I told her what I’d done. It was the

servants’ business to wait on the door when Peters was out, she said,

and on no account was I to ask any one in if she wasn’t there. That

ain’t my idea of hospitality. Is’t yours?”

Dorcas laughed, and said she supposed city ways were not exactly like

those of the country. Phineas guessed they wasn’t, and he was glad to

get where he could tip back in his chair if he wanted to, and eat with

his knife, and ask a friend to come in and sit down.

A few days later Dorcas and her father, with Louie, started for Chicago

to join the Hallams. For four weeks they reveled in the wonders of the

beautiful White City. After that Mrs. Hallam returned to her lonely

house in New York, while Rex and Bertha and Louie went back to the old

Homestead. There they spent the remainder of the summer, and there

Bertha lingered until the hazy light of October was beginning to hang

over the New England hills and the autumnal tints to show in the woods.

Then Rex, who had spent every Sunday there, took her to her new home,

where her reception was very different from what it had been on her

first arrival. Then she was only a hired companion, dining with the

housekeeper and waiting on the fourth floor back for her employer to

give her an audience. Now she was a petted bride, the daughter of the

house, with full authority to go where she pleased, do what she pleased,

and make any change she pleased, from the drawing-room to the handsome

suite which had been fitted up for her. But she made no change, except

in Rex’s sleeping-apartment, where she did take the pictures of

ballet-dancers, rope-walkers, and sporting men from the mirror-frame,

and substituted in their place those of her father, Dorcas, and Grace.

She would have liked to remove her own picture, with “Rose Arabella

Jefferson” written upon it, but Rex interfered. It seemed to him, he

said, a connecting link between his bachelor life and the great joy

which had come to him, and it should stay there, Rose Arabella and all.

Mr. Leighton and Dorcas have twice visited Bertha in her home, and been

happy there because she was so happy. But both were glad to go back to

the old house under the apple-trees and the country life which they like

best. Bertha, on the contrary, takes readily to the ways of the great

city, although she cares but little for the fashionable society that is

so eager to take her up, and prefers the companionship of her husband

and the quiet of her home to the gayest assemblage in New York.

Occasionally however, she may be seen at some afternoon tea, or dinner,

or reception, where Mrs. Hallam is proud to introduce her as “my

nephew’s wife,” while Mrs. Walker Haynes, always politic and persistent,

speaks of her as “my friend, that charming Mrs. Reginald Hallam.”

THE SPRING FARM.

CHAPTER I.

AT THE FARM HOUSE.

It was a very pleasant, homelike old farm house, standing among the New

England hills, with the summer sunshine falling upon it, and the summer

air, sweet with the perfume of roses and June pinks, filling the wide

hall and great square rooms, where, on the morning when our story opens,

the utmost confusion prevailed. Carpets were up; curtains were down;

huge boxes were standing everywhere, while into them two men and a boy

were packing the furniture scattered promiscuously around, for on the

morrow the family, who had owned and occupied the house so long, were to

leave the premises and seek another home in the little village about two

miles away. In one of the lower rooms in the wing to the right, where

the sunshine was the brightest and the rose-scented air the sweetest, a

white-faced woman lay upon a couch looking at and listening to a lady

who sat talking to her, with money and pride and selfishness stamped

upon her as plainly as if the words had been placarded upon her back.

The lady was Mrs. Marshall-More, of Boston, whose handsome country house

was not far from the red farm house, which, with its rich,

well-cultivated acres, had, by the foreclosure of a mortgage she held

upon it, recently come into her possession, or rather into that of her

half brother, who had bidden it off for her.

Mrs. Marshall-More had once been plain Mrs. John More, but since her

husband’s death, she had prefixed her maiden name, with a hyphen to the

More, making herself Mrs. Marshall-More, which, she thought, had a very

aristocratic look and sound. She was a great lady in her own immediate

circle of friends in the city, and a greater lady in Merrivale, where

she passed her summers, and her manner toward the little woman on the

couch was one of infinite superiority and patronage, mingled with a show

of interest and pity. She had driven to the farm house that morning,

ostensibly to say good-bye to the family, but really to go over the

place which she had coveted so long as a most desirable adjunct to her

possessions. What she was saying to the white-faced woman in the widow’s

cap was this:

“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Graham, and I hope you do not blame me

for foreclosing the mortgage. I had to have the money, for Archie’s

college expenses will be very heavy, and then I am going to Europe this

summer, and I did not care to draw from my other investments.”

“Oh, no, I blame no one, but it is very hard all the same to leave the

old home where I have been so happy,” Mrs. Graham replied, and Mrs.

Marshall-More went on: “I am glad to hear you say so, for the Merrivale

people have been very ill-natured about it and I have heard more than

once that I hastened the foreclosure and intend to tear down the old

house and build a cottage, which is false.”

To this Mrs. Graham made no reply, and Mrs. Marshall-More continued:

“You will be much better off in the village than in this great rambling

house, and your children will find employment there. Maude must be

eighteen, and ought to be a great help to you. I hear she is a

sentimental dreamer, living mostly in the clouds with people only known

to herself, and perhaps she needed this change to rouse her to the

realities of life.”

“Maude is the dearest girl in the world,” was the mother’s quick protest

against what seemed like disapprobation of her daughter.

“Yes, of course,” was Mrs. Marshall-More’s response. “Maude is a nice

girl and a pretty girl and will be a great comfort to you when she wakes

up to the fact that life is earnest and not all a dream, and in time you

will be quite as happy in your new home as you could be here, where it

must be very dreary in the winter, when the snow-drifts are piled up to

the very window ledges, and the wind screams at you through every

crevice.”

“Oh-h,” Mrs. Graham said, with a shudder, her thoughts going back to the

day when the blinding snow had come down in great billows upon the

newly-made grave in which she left her husband, and went back alone to

the desolate home where he would never come again.

It had been so terrible and sudden, his going from her. Well in the

morning, and dead at night; killed by a locomotive and brought to her so

mangled that she could never have recognized him as her husband. People

had called him over-generous and extravagant, and perhaps he was, but

the money he spent so lavishly was always for others, and not for

himself, and as the holder of the heavy mortgage on his farm had been

content with the interest and never pressed his claim, he had made no

effort to lessen it, even after he knew it passed into the hands of Mrs.

Marshall-More, who had often expressed a wish to own the place known as

the Spring Farm, and so-called from the numerous springs upon it. She

would fill it with her city friends and set up quite an English

establishment, she said; and now it was hers, to all intents and

purposes, for though the deed was in her brother’s name, it was

understood that she was mistress of the place and could do what she

liked with it. Of the real owner, Max Gordon, her half-brother, little

was known, except the fact that he was very wealthy and had for years

been engaged to a lady who, by a fall from a horse, had been crippled

for life. It was also rumored that the lady had insisted upon releasing

her lover from his engagement, but he had refused to be released, and

still clung to the hope that she would eventually recover. Just where he

was at present, nobody knew. He seldom visited his sister, although she

was very proud of him and very fond of talking of her brother Max, who,

she said, was so generous and good, although a little queer. He had

bidden off the Spring Farm because she asked him to do so, and a few

thousand dollars more or less were nothing to him; then, telling her to

do what she liked with it, he had gone his way, while poor Lucy Graham’s

heart was breaking at the thought of leaving the home which her husband

had made so beautiful for her. An old-fashioned place, it is true, but

one of those old-fashioned places to which our memory clings fondly, and

our thoughts go back with an intense longing years after the flowers we

have watered are dead, and the shrubs we have planted are trees pointing

to the sky. A great square house, with a wing on either side, a wide

hall through the center and a fireplace in every room. A well-kept lawn

in front, dotted with shade trees and flowering shrubs, and on one side

of it a running brook, fed by a spring on the hillside to the west;

borders and beds and mounds of flowers;—tulips and roses and pansies and

pinks and peonies and lilies and geraniums and verbenas, each blossoming

in its turn and making the garden and grounds a picture of beauty all

the summer long. No wonder that Lucy Graham loved it and shrank from

leaving it, and shrank, too, from Mrs. Marshall-More’s attempts at

consolation, saying only when that lady arose to go, “It was kind in you

to come and I thank you for it; but just now my heart aches too hard to

be comforted. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, I shall call when you get settled in town, and if I can be of

any service to you I will gladly do so,” Mrs. Marshall-More said, as she

left the room and went out to her carriage, where she stood for a moment

looking up and down the road, and saying to herself, “Where can Archie

be?”

CHAPTER II.

WHERE ARCHIE WAS.

A long lane wound away to the westward across a strip of land called the

mowing lot, through a bit of woods and on to a grassy hillside, where,

under the shade of a butternut tree, a pair of fat, sleek oxen were

standing with a look of content in their large, bright eyes as if well

pleased with this unwonted freedom from the plough and the cart. Against

the side of one of them a young girl was leaning, with her arm thrown

across its neck and her hand caressing the long, white horn of the dumb

creature which seemed to enjoy it. The girl was Maude Graham, and she

made a very pretty picture as she stood there with her short, brown hair

curling in soft rings about her forehead; her dark blue eyes, her

bright, glowing face, and a mouth which looked as if made for kisses and

sweetness rather than the angry words she was hurling at the young man,

or boy, for he was only twenty, who stood before her.

“Archie More,” she was saying, “I don’t think it very nice in you to

talk to me in that patronizing kind of way, as if you were so much my

superior in everything, and trying to convince me that it is nothing for

us to give up the dear old place where every stone and stump means

somebody to me, for I know them all and have talked with them all, and

called them by name, just as I know all the maiden ferns and water

lilies and where the earliest arbutus blossoms in the spring. Oh,

Archie, how can I leave Spring Farm and never come back again! I think I

hate you all for taking it from us, and especially your uncle Max.”

Here she broke down entirely, and laying her face on the shining coat of

the ox began to cry as if her heart would break, while Archie looked at

her in real distress wondering what he should say. He was a city-bred

young man, with a handsome, boyish face, and in a way very fond of

Maude, whom he had known ever since he was thirteen and she eleven, and

he first came to Merrivale to spend the summer. They had played and

fished together in the brook, and rowed together on the pond and

quarreled and made up, and latterly they had flirted a little, too,

although Archie was careful that the flirting should not go too far, for

he felt that there was a vast difference between Archie More, son of

Mrs. Marshall-More, and Maude Graham, daughter of a country farmer. And

still he thought her the sweetest, prettiest girl he had ever seen, a

_jolly lot_ he called her, and he writhed under her bitter words, and

when she cried he tried to comfort her and explain matters as best he

could. But Maude was not to be appeased. She had felt all the time that

the place need not have been sold, that it was a hasty thing, and though

she did not blame Archie, she was very sore against Mrs. Marshall-More

and her brother, and her only answer to all Archie could say, was:

“You needn’t talk. I hate you all, and your uncle Max the most, and if I

ever see him I’ll tell him so, and if I don’t you may tell him for me.”

Archie could keep silent and hear his mother blamed and himself, but he

roused in defense of his uncle Max.

“Hate my uncle Max,” he exclaimed. “Why, he is the best man that ever

lived, and the kindest. He knew nothing of you, or how you’d feel, when

he bought the place; if he had he wouldn’t have done it; and if he could

see you now, crying on that ox’s neck, he would give it back to you.

That would be just like him.”

“As if I’d take it,” Maude said, scornfully, as she lifted up her head

and dashed the tears from her eyes with a rapid movement of both hands.

“No, Archie More, I shall never take Spring Farm as a gift from any one,

much less from your uncle Max; but I shall buy it of him some day if he

keeps it long enough.”

“You?” Archie asked, and Maude replied, “Yes, I, why not? I know I am

poor now, but I shall not always be so. People call me crazy, a dreamer,

a crank, and all that, because they cannot see what I see; the people

who are with me always, my friends; and I know their names and how they

look and where they live; Mrs. Kimbrick, with her fifty daughters, all

Eliza Anns, and Mrs. Webster, with her fifty daughters, all Ann Elizas,

and Angeline Mason, who comes and talks to me in the twilight, wearing a

yellow dress; they are real to me as you are, and do you think I am

crazy and a crank because of that?”

Archie said he didn’t, but he looked a little suspiciously at the girl

standing there so erect, her eyes shining with a strange light as she

talked to him of things he could not understand. He had heard of this

Mrs. Kimbrick and Mrs. Webster before, with their fifty daughters each,

and had thought Maude queer, to say the least. He was sure of it now as

she went on:

“Is the earth crazy because there is in it a little acorn which you

can’t see, but which is still there, maturing and taking root for the

grand old oak, whose branches will one day give shelter to many a tired

head? Of course not; neither am I, and some time these brain children,

or brain seeds, call them what you like, will take shape and grow, and

the world will hear of them, and of me; and you and your mother will be

proud to say you knew me once, when the people praise the book I am

going to write.”

“A book!” and Archie laughed incredulously, it seemed so absurd that

little Maude Graham should ever become an author of whom the world would

hear.

“Yes,” she answered him decidedly. “A book! Why not? It is in me; it has

been there always, and I can no more help writing it than you can help

doing,—well, nothing, as you always have. Yes, I shall write a book, and

you will read it, Archie More, and thousands more, too; and I shall put

Spring Farm in it, and you, and your uncle Max. I think I shall make him

the villain.”

She was very hard upon poor Max, whose only offense was that he had

bidden off Spring Farm to please his sister, but Archie was ready to

defend him again.

“If you knew uncle Max,” he said, “you would make him your hero instead

of your villain, for a better man never lived. He is kindness itself and

the soul of honor. Why, when he was very young he was engaged to a girl

who fell from a horse and broke her leg, or her neck, or her back, I’ve

forgotten which. Anyhow, she cannot walk and has to be wheeled in a

chair, but Max sticks to her like a burr, because he thinks he ought. I

am sure I hope he will never marry her.”

“Why not?” Maude asked, and he replied:

“Because, you see, Max has a heap of money, and if he never marries and

I outlive him, some of it will come to me. Money is a good thing, I tell

you.”

“I didn’t suppose you as mean as that, Archie More! and I hope Mr. Max

will marry that broken-backed woman, and that she will live a thousand

years! Yes, I do!”

The last three words were emphasized with so vigorous blows on the back

of the ox, that he started away suddenly, and Maude would have fallen if

Archie had not caught her in his arms.

“Now, Maude,” he said, as he held her for a moment closely to him,

“don’t let’s quarrel any more. I’m going away to-morrow to the

Adirondacks, then in the fall to college, and may not see you again for

a long time; but I sha’n’t forget you. I like you the best of any girl

in the world; I do, upon my honor.”

“No, you don’t. I know exactly what you think of me, and always have,

but it does not matter now,” Maude answered vehemently. “You are going

your way, and I am going mine, and the two ways will never meet.”

And so, quarreling and making up, but making up rather more than they

quarreled, the two went slowly along the gravelly lane until they

reached the house where Mrs. Marshall-More was standing with a very

severe look upon her face, as she said to her son:

“Do you know how long you have kept me waiting?”

Then to Maude:

“Been crying? I am sorry you take it so hard. Believe me, you will be

better off in the village. Neither your mother nor you could run the

farm, and you will find some employment there. I hear that Mrs. Nipe is

wanting an apprentice and that she will give small wages at first, which

is not usual with dressmakers. You’d better apply at once.”

“Thank you,” Maude answered quickly. “I do not think I shall learn

dressmaking,” and Maude looked at the lady as proudly as a queen might

look upon her subject. “Mrs. More, do you think your brother would

promise to keep Spring Farm until I can buy it back?” she continued.

The idea that Maude Graham could ever buy Spring Farm was so

preposterous that Mrs. Marshall-More laughed immoderately, as she

replied, “Perhaps so. I will ask him; or you can do it yourself. I don’t

know where he is now. I seldom do know, but anything addressed to his

club, No. —, —— Street, Boston, will reach him in time. And now we must

go. Good-bye.”

She offered the tips of her fingers to the girl who just touched them,

and then giving her hand to Archie said, “Good-bye, Archie, I am sorry

we quarreled so, and I did not mean half I said to you. I hope you will

forget it. Good-bye; I may never see you again.”

If Archie had dared he would have kissed the face which had never looked

so sweet to him as now; but his mother’s eyes were upon him and so he

only said “Good-bye,” and took his seat in the carriage with a feeling

that something which had been very dear had dropped out of his life.

CHAPTER III.

GOING WEST.

It was a very plain but pretty little cottage of which Mrs. Graham took

possession with her children, Maude and John, who was two years younger

than his sister. As most of the furniture had been sold it did not take

them long to settle, and then the question arose as to how they were to

live. A thousand dollars was all they had in the world, and these Mrs.

Graham placed in the savings bank against a time of greater need, hoping

that, as her friends assured her, something would turn up. “If there was

anything I could do, I would do it so willingly,” Maude was constantly

saying to herself, while busy with the household duties which now fell

to her lot and to which she was unaccustomed. During her father’s life

two strong German girls had been employed in the house and Maude had

been as tenderly and delicately reared as are the daughters of

millionaires. But now everything was changed, and those who had known

her only as an idle dreamer and devourer of books, were astonished at

the energy and capability which she developed. But these did not

understand the girl or know that all the stronger part of her nature had

been called into being by the exigencies of the case. Maude’s love for

her mother was deep and unselfish, and for her sake she tried to make

the most and the best of everything. Stifling with a smile born of a sob

all her longings for the past, she turned her thoughts steadily to the

one purpose of her life,—buying Spring Farm back! But how? The book she

was going to write did not seem quite so certain now. Her brain children

had turned traitors and flown away from the sweeping, dusting,

dishwashing and bedmaking which fell to her lot and which she did with a

song on her lips lest her mother should detect the heartache which was

always with her, even when her face was the brightest and her song the

sweetest. She had written to Archie’s uncle without a suspicion that she

did not know his real name. As he was a brother of Mrs. More, whose

maiden name was Marshall, his must be Marshall too, she reasoned,

forgetting to have heard that Mrs. More was only a half-sister and that

there had been two fathers. Of course, he was Max Marshall, and she

addressed him as follows:

“MERRIVALE, July —, 18—.

“MR. MAX MARSHALL:

“DEAR SIR,—I am Maude Graham, and you bought my old home, Spring Farm,

and it nearly broke my own and mamma’s heart to have it sold. I don’t

blame you much now for buying it, but I did once, and I said some hard

things about you to Archie More, your nephew, which he may repeat to

you. But I was angry then at him and everybody, and I am sorry that I

said them. I am only eighteen and very poor, but I shall be rich some

day,—I am sure of it,—and able to buy Spring Farm, and I want you to

keep it for me and not sell it to any one else. It may be years, but

the day will come when I shall have the money of my own. Will you keep

the place till then? I think I shall be happier and have more courage

to work if you write and say you will.

“Yours truly, “MAUDE GRAHAM.”

After this letter was sent and before she had reason to expect an

answer, Maude began to look for it, but none came, and the summer

stretched on into August and the house at Spring Farm was shut up, for

Mrs. Marshall-More was in Europe, and Maude’s great anxiety was to find

something to do for her own and her mother’s support. Miss Nipe, the

dressmaker, would give her a dollar a week while she was learning the

trade, and this, with the three dollars per week which her brother John

was earning in a grocery store, would be better than nothing, and she

was seriously considering the matter, when a letter from her mother’s

brother, who lived “out West,” as that portion of New York between the

Cayuga Bridge and Buffalo was then called, changed the whole aspect of

her affairs and forged the first link in the chain of her destiny. He

could not take his sister and her children into his own large family, he

wrote, but he had a plan to propose which, he thought, would prove

advantageous to Maude, if her mother approved of it and would spare her

from home. About six miles from his place was a school, which his

daughter had taught for two years, but as she was about to be married,

the position was open to Maude at four dollars a week and her board,

provided she would take it.

“Maude is rather young, I know,” Mr. Ailing wrote in conclusion, “but no

younger than Annie was when she began to teach, so her age need not

stand in the way, if she chooses to come. The country will seem new and

strange to her; there are still log-houses in the Bush district; indeed,

the school-house is built of logs and the people ride in lumber wagons

and are not like Bostonians or New Yorkers, but they are very kind, and

Maude will get accustomed to them in time. My advice is that she

accept.”

At first Mrs. Graham refused to let her young daughter go so far from

home, but Maude was persistent and eager. Log-houses and lumber wagons

had no terrors for her. Indeed, they were rather attractions than

otherwise, and fired her imagination, which began at once to people

those houses of the olden time with the Kimbricks and the Websters, who

had forsaken her so long. Four dollars a week seemed a fortune to her,

and she would save it all, she said, and send it to her mother, who

unwillingly consented at last and fortunately found a gentleman in town

who was going to Chicago and would take charge of Maude as far as

Canandaigua, where she was to leave the train and finish her journey by

stage. But on the evening of the day before the one when Maude was to

start, the gentleman received word that his son was very ill in Portland

and required his immediate presence.

“I can go alone,” Maude said courageously, though with a little sinking

of the heart. “No one will harm me. Crossing the river at Albany is the

worst, but I can do as the rest do, and after that I do not leave the

car again until we reach Canandaigua.”

“Don’t feel so badly, mamma,” she continued, winding her arms around her

mother’s neck and kissing away her tears. “I am not afraid, and don’t

you know how often you have said that God cared for the fatherless, and

I am that, and I shall ask Him all the time I am in the car to take care

of me, and He will answer. He will hear. I’m not a child. I am eighteen

in the Bible and a great deal older than that since father died. Don’t

cry, darling mamma, and make it harder for me. I must go to-morrow, for

school begins next Monday.”

So, for her daughter’s sake, Mrs. Graham tried to be calm, and Maude’s

little hair trunk was packed with the garments, in each of which was

folded a mother’s prayer for the safety of her child; and the morning

came, and the ticket was bought, and the conductor, with whom Mrs.

Graham had a slight acquaintance, promised to see to the little girl as

far as Albany, where he would put her in charge of the man who took his

place. Then the good-byes were said and the train moved on past the

village on the hillside, past the dear old Spring Farm which she looked

at through blinding tears as long as a tree-top was in sight, past the

graveyard where her father was lying, past the meadows and woods and

hills she loved so well, and on towards the new country and the new life

of which she knew so little.

CHAPTER IV.

ON THE ROAD.

Those were the days when the Boston train westward-bound moved at a

snail’s pace compared with what it does now, and twenty-four hours

instead of twelve were required for the trip from Merrivale to

Canandaigua, so that the afternoon was drawing to a close when the cars

stopped in Greenbush and the passengers alighted and rushed for the boat

which was to take them across the river. This, and re-checking her

trunk, was what Maude dreaded the most, and her face was very white and

scared and her heart beating violently as she followed the crowd,

wondering if she should ever find her trunk among all that pile of

baggage they were handling so roughly, and if it would be smashed to

pieces when she did, and if she should get into the right car, or be

carried somewhere else. She had lost sight of the conductor. Her head

was beginning to ache, and there was a lump in her throat every time she

thought of her mother and John, who would soon be taking their simple

evening meal and talking of her.

“I wonder if I can bear it,” she said to herself, as she sat in the

cabin the very image of despair, clasping her hand-bag tightly and

looking anxiously at the people around her as if in search of some

friendly face, which she could trust.

She had heard so much before leaving home of wolves in sheep’s or rather

men’s clothing, who infest railway trains, ready to pounce upon any

unsuspecting girl who chanced to fall in their way, and had been so much

afraid that some of the wolves might be on her train, lying in wait for

her, that she had resolutely kept her head turned to the window all the

time with a prayer in her heart that God would let no one speak to and

frighten her. And thus far no one had spoken to her, except the

conductor, but God must have deserted her now, for just as they were

reaching the opposite shore, a gentleman, who had been watching her ever

since she crouched down in the shadowy corner, and who had seen her wipe

the tears away more than once, came up to her and said, “Are you alone,

and can I do anything for you?”

“Yes,—no; oh, I don’t know,” Maude gasped as she clutched her bag, in

which was her purse, more tightly, and looked up at the face above her.

It was such a pleasant face, and the voice was so kind and reassuring,

that she forgot the wolves and might have given him her bag, purse,

check and all, if the conductor had not just then appeared and taken her

in charge. Lifting his hat politely the stranger walked away, while

Maude went to identify her trunk.

“Will you take a sleeper?” the conductor asked.

And she replied: “Oh, no. I can’t afford that.”

So he found her a whole seat in the common car, and telling her he would

speak of her to the new conductor, bade her good-bye, and she was left

alone.

Very nervously she watched her fellow passengers as they came hurrying

in,—men, mostly, it seemed to her,—rough-looking men, too, for there had

been a horserace that day at a point on the Harlem road, and they were

returning from it. Occasionally some one of them stopped and looked at

the girl in black, who sat so straight and still, with her hand-bag held

down upon the vacant seat beside her as if to keep it intact. But no one

offered to take it, and Maude breathed more freely as the crowded train

moved slowly from the depot. After a little the new conductor came and

spoke to her and looked at her ticket and went out, and then she was

really alone. New England, with its rocks and hills and mountains, was

behind her. Mother, and John, and home were far away, and the lump in

her throat grew larger, and there crept over her such a sense of

dreariness and homesickness, that she would have cried outright if she

dared to. There were only six women in the car besides herself. All the

rest were _wolves_; she felt sure of that, they talked and laughed so

loud, and spit so much tobacco-juice. They were so different from the

stranger on the boat, she thought, wondering who he was and where he had

gone. How pleasantly he had spoken to her, and how she wished——She got

no further, for a voice said to her:

“Can I sit by you? Every other seat is taken.”

“Yes, oh, yes. I am so glad,” Maude exclaimed involuntarily in her

delight at recognizing the stranger, and springing to her feet she

offered him the seat next to the window.

“Oh, no,” he said, with a smile which would have won the confidence of

any girl. “Keep that yourself. You will be more comfortable there. Are

you going to ride all night?”

“Yes, I am going to Canandaigua,” she replied.

“To Canandaigua!” he repeated, looking at her a little curiously; but he

asked no more questions then, and busied himself with adjusting his bag

and his large traveling shawl, which last he put on the back of the

seat,, more behind Maude than himself.

Then he took out a magazine, while Maude watched him furtively, thinking

him the finest looking man she had ever seen, except her father, of

whom, in his manner, he reminded her a little. Not nearly so old,

certainly, as her father, and not young like Archie either, for there

were a few threads of grey in his mustache and in his brown hair which

had a trick of curling slightly at the ends under his soft felt hat. Who

was he? she wondered. The initials on his satchel were “M. G.,” but that

told her nothing. How she hoped he was going as far as she was, she felt

so safe with him, and at last, as the darkness increased and he shut up

his book, she ventured to ask:

“Are you going far?”

“Yes,” he replied, with a twinkle of humor in his blue eyes, “and if

none of these men get out, I am afraid I shall have to claim your

forbearance all night, but I will make myself as small as possible.

Look,” and with a laugh he drew himself close to the arm of the seat,

leaving quite a space between them; but he did not tell her that he had

engaged a berth in the sleeper, which he had abandoned when he found her

there alone, with that set of roughs, whose character he knew.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these ye have done

it unto me,” would surely be said to him some day, for he was always

giving the cup of water, even to those who did not know they were

thirsting until after they had drunk of what he offered them. Once he

brought Maude some water in a little glass tumbler, which he took from

his satchel, and once he offered her an apple which she declined lest

she should seem too forward; then, as the hours crept on and her eyelids

began to droop, he folded his shawl carefully and made her let him put

it behind her head, suggesting that she remove her hat, as she would

rest more comfortably without it.

“Now sleep quietly,” he said, and as if there were something mesmeric in

his voice, Maude went to sleep at once and dreamed she was at home with

her mother beside her, occasionally fixing the pillow under her head and

covering her with something which added to her comfort.

It was the stranger’s light overcoat which, as the September night grew

cold and chill, he put over the girl, whose upturned face he had studied

as intently as she had studied his. About seven o’clock the conductor

came in, lantern in hand, and as its rays fell upon the stranger, he

said, “Hello, Gordon, you here? I thought you were in the sleeper. On

guard, I see, as usual. Who is the lamb this time?”

“I don’t know; do you?” the man called Gordon replied.

“No,” the conductor said, turning his light full upon Maude; then, “Why,

it’s a little girl the Boston conductor put in my care; but she’s safer

with you. Comes from the mountains somewhere, I believe. Guess she is

going to seek her fortune. She ought to find it, with that face. Isn’t

she pretty?” and he glanced admiringly at the sweet young face now

turned to one side, with one hand under the flushed cheek and the short

rings of damp hair curling round her forehead.

“Yes, very,” Gordon replied, moving uneasily and finally holding a

newspaper between Maude and the conductor’s lantern, for it did not seem

right to him that any eyes except those of a near friend should take

this advantage of a sleeping girl.

The conductor passed on, and then Gordon fell asleep until they reached

a way station, where the sudden stopping of a train roused him to

consciousness, and a moment after he was confronted by a young man, who,

at sight of him, stopped short and exclaimed:

“Max Gordon, as I live! I’ve hunted creation over for you and given you

up. Where have you been and why weren’t you at Long Branch, as you said

you’d be when you wrote me to join you there?”

“Got tired of it, you were so long coming, so I went to the Adirondacks

with Archie.”

“Did you bring me any letters?” Max replied, and his friend continued,

“Yes, a cart load. Six, any way,” and he began to take them from his

side pocket. “One, two, three, four, five; there’s another somewhere.

Oh, here ’tis,” he said, taking out the sixth, which looked rather

soiled and worn. “I suppose it’s for you,” he continued, “although it’s

directed to Mr. Max Marshall, Esq., and is in a school-girl’s

handwriting. It came long ago, and we chaps puzzled over it a good

while; then, as no one appeared to claim it, and it was mailed at

Merrivale, where your sister spends her summers, I ventured to bring it

with the rest. If you were not such a saint I’d say you had been

imposing a false name upon some innocent country girl, and, by George, I

believe she’s here now with your ulster over her! Running off with her,

eh? What will Miss Raynor say?” he went on, as his eyes fell upon Maude,

who just then stirred in her sleep and murmured softly, “Our Father, who

art in Heaven.”

She was at home in her little white-curtained bedroom, kneeling with her

mother and saying her nightly prayer, and, involuntarily, both the young

men bowed their heads as if receiving a benediction.

“I think, Dick, that your vile insinuation is answered,” Max said, and

Dick rejoined, “Yes, I beg your pardon. Under your protection, I s’pose.

Well, she’s safe; but I must be finding that berth of mine. Will see you

in the morning. Good-night.”

He left the car, while Max Gordon tried to read his letters as best he

could by the dim light near him. One was from his sister, one from

Archie, three on business, while the last puzzled him a little, and he

held it awhile as if uncertain as to his right to open it.

“It must be for me,” he said at last, and breaking the seal he read

Maude’s letter to him, unconscious that Maude was sleeping there beside

him.

Indeed, he had never heard of Maude Graham before, and had scarcely

given a thought to the former owners of Spring Farm. His sister had a

mortgage upon it; the man was dead; the place must be sold, and Mrs.

More asked him to buy it; that was all he knew when he bid it off.

“Poor little girl,” he said to himself. “If I had known about you, I

don’t believe I’d have bought the place. There was no necessity to

foreclose, I am sure; but it was just like Angie; and what must this

Maude think of me not to have answered her letter. I am so sorry;” and

his sorrow manifested itself in an increased attention to the girl, over

whom he adjusted his ulster more carefully, for the air in the car was

growing very damp and chilly.

It was broad daylight when Maude awoke, starting up with a smile on her

face and reminding Max of some lovely child when first aroused from

sleep.

“Why, I have slept all night,” she exclaimed, as she tossed back her

wavy hair; “and you have given me your shawl and ulster, too,” she

added, with a blush which made her face, as Max thought, the prettiest

he had ever seen.

Who was she, he wondered, and once he thought to ask her the question

direct; then he tried by a little _finessing_ to find out who she was

and where she came from, but Maude’s mother had so strongly impressed it

upon her not to be at all communicative to strangers, that she was

wholly non-committal even while suspecting his design, and when at last

Canandaigua was reached he knew no more of her history than when he

first saw her, white and trembling on the boat. She was going to take

the Genesee stage, she said, and expected her uncle to meet her at Oak

Corners in Richland.

“Why, that is funny,” he said. “If it were not that a carriage is to

meet me, I should still be your fellow-traveler, for my route lies that

way.”

And then he did ask her uncle’s name. She surely might tell him so much,

Maude thought, and replied:

“Captain James Alling, my mother’s brother.”

Her name was not Alling, then, and reflecting that now he knew who her

uncle was he could probably trace her, Max saw her into the stage, and

taking her ungloved hand in his held it perhaps a trifle longer than he

would have done if it had not been so very soft and white and pretty,

and rested so confidingly in his, while she thanked him for his

kindness. Then the stage drove away, while he stood watching it, and

wondering why the morning was not quite so bright as it had been an hour

ago, and why he had not asked her point-blank who she was, or had been

so stupid as not to give her his card.

“Max Gordon, you certainly are getting into your dotage,” he said to

himself. “A man of your age to be so interested in a little unknown

girl! What would Grace say? Poor Grace. I wonder if I shall find her

improved, and why she has buried herself in this part of the country.”

As he entered the hotel a thought of Maude Graham’s letter came to his

mind, and calling for pen and paper he dashed off the following:

CANANDAIGUA, September —, 18—.

MISS MAUDE GRAHAM,—Your letter did not reach me until last night, when

it was brought me by a friend. I have not been in Boston since the

first of last July, and the reason it was not forwarded to me is that

you addressed it wrong, and they were in doubt as to its owner. My

name is Gordon, not Marshall, as you supposed, and I am very sorry for

your sake and your mother’s that I ever bought Spring Farm. Had I

known what I do now I should not have done so. But it is too late, and

I can only promise to keep it as you wish until you can buy it back.

You are a brave little girl and I will sell it to you cheap. I should

very much like to know you, and when I am again in Merrivale I shall

call upon you and your mother, if she will let me.

With kind regards to her I am

Yours truly,

“MAX GORDON.”

The letter finished, he folded and directed it to Miss Maude Graham,

Merrivale, Mass., while she for whom it was intended was huddled up in

one corner of the crowded stage and going on as fast as four fleet

horses could take her towards Oak Corners and the friends awaiting her

there. Thus strangely do two lives sometimes meet and cross each other

and then drift widely apart; but not forever, in this instance, let us

hope.

CHAPTER V.

MISS RAYNOR.

About a mile from Laurel Hill, a little village in Richland, was an

eminence, or plateau, from the top of which one could see for miles the

rich, well-cultivated farms in which the town abounded, the wooded hills

and the deep gorges all slanting down to a common centre, the pretty

little lake, lying as in the bottom of a basin, with its clear waters

sparkling in the sunshine. And here, just on the top of the plateau,

where the view was the finest, an eccentric old bachelor, Paul Raynor,

had a few years before our story opens, built himself a home after his

own peculiar ideas of architecture, but which, when finished and

furnished, was a most delightful place, especially in the summer when

the flowers and shrubs, of which there was a great profusion, were in

blossom, and the wide lawn in front of the house was like a piece of

velvet. Here for two years Paul Raynor had lived quite _en prince_, and

then, sickening with what he knew to be a fatal disease, he had sent for

his invalid sister Grace, who came and stayed with him to the last,

finding after he was dead that all his property had been left to her,

with a request that she would make the Cedars, as the place was called,

her home for a portion of the time at least. And so, though city bred

and city born, Grace had stayed on for nearly a year, leading a lonely

life, for she knew but few of her neighbors, while her crippled

condition prevented her from mingling at all in the society she was so

well fitted to adorn. As the reader will have guessed, Grace Raynor was

the girl, or rather woman, for she was over thirty now, to whom Max

Gordon had devoted the years of his early manhood, in the vain hope that

some time she would be cured and become his wife. A few days before the

one appointed for her bridal she had been thrown from her horse and had

injured her spine so badly that for months she suffered such agony that

her beautiful hair turned white; then the pain ceased suddenly, but left

her no power to move her lower limbs, and she had never walked since and

never would. But through all the long years Max had clung to her with a

devotion born first of his intense love for her and later of his sense

of honor which would make him loyal to her even to the grave. Knowing

how domestic he was in his tastes and how happy he would be with wife

and children, Grace had insisted that he should leave her and seek some

other love. But his answer was always the same. “No, Grace, I am bound

to you just as strongly as if the clergyman had made us one, and will

marry you any day you will say the word. Your lameness is nothing so

long as your soul is left untouched, and your face, too,” he would

sometimes add, kissing fondly the lovely face which, with each year,

seemed to grow lovelier, and from which the snowy hair did not in the

least detract.

But Grace knew better than to inflict herself upon him, and held fast to

her resolve, even while her whole being went out to him with an intense

longing for his constant love and companionship. Especially was this the

case at the Cedars, where she found herself very lonely, notwithstanding

the beauty of the place and its situation.

“If he asks me again, shall I refuse?” she said to herself on the

September morning when Maude Graham was alighting from the dusty stage

at Oak Corners, two miles away, and the carriage sent for Max was only

an hour behind.

How pretty she was in the dainty white dress, with a shawl of scarlet

wool wrapped around her, as she sat in her wheel chair on the broad

piazza, which commanded a view of the lake and the green hills beyond.

Not fresh and bright and glowing as Maude, who was like an opening rose

with the early dew upon it, but more like a pale water lily just

beginning to droop, though very sweet and lovely still. There was a

faint tinge of color in her cheek as she leaned her head against the

cushions of her chair and wondered if she should find Max the same

ardent lover as ever, ready to take her to his arms at any cost, or had

he, during the past year, seen some other face fairer and younger than

her own.

“I shall know in a moment if he is changed ever so little,” she thought,

and although she did not mean to be selfish, and would at any moment

have given him up and made no sign, there was a throb of pain in her

heart as she tried to think what life would be without Max to love her.

“I should die,” she whispered, “and please God, I shall die before many

years and leave my boy free.”

He was her boy still, just as young and handsome as he had been thirteen

years ago, when he lifted her so tenderly from the ground and she felt

his tears upon her forehead as she writhed in her fearful pain. And now

when at last he came and put his arms around her and took her face

between his hands and looked fondly into it as he questioned her of her

health, she felt that he was unchanged, and thanked her Father for it.

He was delighted with everything, and sat by her until after lunch,

which was served on the piazza, and asked her of her life there and the

people in the neighborhood, and finally if she knew of a Capt. Alling.

“Capt. Alling,” she replied; “why, yes. He lives on a farm about two

miles from here and we buy our honey from him. A very respectable man, I

think, although I have no acquaintance with the family. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing; only there was a girl on the train with me who told me she

was his niece,” Max answered indifferently, with a vigorous puff at his

cigar, which Grace always insisted he should smoke in her presence. “She

was very pretty and very young. I should like to see her again,” he

added, more to himself than to Grace, who, without knowing why, felt

suddenly as if a cloud had crept across her sky.

Jealousy had no part in Grace’s nature, nor was she jealous of this

young, pretty girl whom Max would like to see again, and to prove that

she was not she asked many questions about her and said she would try

and find out who she was, and that she presumed she had come to attend

the wadding of Capt. Alling’s daughter, who was soon to be married. This

seemed very probable, and no more was said of Maude until the afternoon

of the day following, which was Sunday. Then, after Max returned from

church and they were seated at dinner he said abruptly, “I saw her

again.”

“Saw whom?” Grace asked, and he replied, “My little girl of the train.

She was at church with her uncle’s family. A rather ordinary lot I

thought them, but she looked as sweet as a June pink. You know they are

my favorite flowers.”

“Yes,” Grace answered slowly, while again a breath of cold air seemed to

blow over her and make her draw her shawl more closely around her.

But Max did not suspect it, and pared a peach for her and helped her to

grapes, and after dinner wheeled her for an hour on the broad plateau,

stooping over her once and caressing her white hair, which he told her

was very becoming, and saying no more of the girl seen in church that

morning. The Allings had been late and the rector was reading the first

lesson when they came in, father and mother and two healthy, buxom

girls, followed by Maude, who, in her black dress looked taller and

slimmer than he had thought her in the car, and prettier, too, with the

brilliant color on her cheeks and the sparkle in the eyes which met his

with such glad surprise in them that he felt something stir in his heart

different from anything he had felt since he and Grace were young. The

Allings occupied a pew in front of him and on the side, so that he could

look at and study Maude’s face, which he did far more than he listened

to the sermon. And she knew he was looking at her, too, and always

blushed when she met his earnest gaze. As they were leaving the church

he managed to get near her, and said, “I hope you are quite well after

your long journey, Miss——.”

“Graham,” she answered, involuntarily, but so low that he only caught

the first syllable and thought that she said _Grey_.

She was Miss Grey, then, and with this bit of information he was obliged

to be content. Twice during the week he rode past the Alling house,

hoping to see the eyes which had flashed so brightly upon him on the

porch of the church, and never dreaming of the hot tears of homesickness

they were weeping in the log school-house of the Bush district, where

poor Maude was so desolate and lonely. If he had, he might, perhaps,

have gone there and tried to comfort her, so greatly was he interested

in her, and so much was she in his mind.

He stayed at the Cedars several days, and then finding it a little

tiresome said good-bye to Grace and went his way again, leaving her with

a vague consciousness that something had come between them; a shadow no

larger than a man’s hand, it is true, but still a shadow, and as she

watched him going down the walk she whispered sadly, “Max is slipping

from me.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE SCHOOL MISTRESS.

The setting sun of a raw January afternoon was shining into the dingy

school-room where Maude sat by the iron-rusted box stove, with her feet

on the hearth, reading a note which had been brought to her just before

the close of school by a man who had been to the postoffice in the

village at the foot of the lake. It was nearly four months since she

first crossed the threshold of the log school-house, taking in at a

glance the whole dreariness of her surroundings, and feeling for the

moment that she could not endure it. But she was somewhat accustomed to

it now, and not half so much afraid of the tall girls and boys, her

scholars, as she had been at first, while the latter were wholly devoted

to her and not a little proud of their “young school ma’am,” as they

called her. Everybody was kind to her, and she had not found “boarding

round” so very dreadful after all, for the fatted calf was always killed

for her, and the best dishes brought out, while it was seldom that she

was called upon to share her sleeping-room with more than one member of

the family. And still there was ever present with her a longing for her

mother and for Johnnie and a life more congenial to her tastes. Dreaming

was out of the question now, and the book which was to make her famous

and buy back the old home seemed very far in the future. Just how large

a portion of her thoughts was given to Max Gordon it was difficult to

say. She had felt a thrill of joy when she saw him in church, and a

little proud, too, it may be, of his notice of her. Very minutely her

cousins had questioned her with regard to her acquaintance with him,

deploring her stupidity in not having ascertained who he was. A

relative, most likely, of Miss Raynor, in whose pew he sat, they

concluded, and they told their cousin of the lady at the Cedars, Grace

Raynor, who could not walk a step, but was wheeled in a chair, sometimes

by a maid and sometimes by a man. The lady _par excellence_ of the

neighborhood she seemed to be, and Maude found herself greatly

interested in her and in everything pertaining to her. Twice she had

been through the grounds, which were open to the public, and had seen

Grace both times in the distance, once sitting in her chair upon the

piazza, and once being wheeled in the woods by her man-servant, Tom. But

beyond this she had not advanced, and nothing could be farther from her

thoughts than the idea that she would ever be anything to the lady of

the Cedars. Max Gordon’s letter had been forwarded to her from

Merrivale, but had created no suspicion in her mind that he and her

friend of the train were one. She had thought it a little strange that

he should have been in Canandaigua the very day that she arrived there,

and wished she might have seen him, but the truth never dawned upon her

until some time in December, when her mother wrote to her that he had

called to see them, expressing much regret at Maude’s absence, and when

told where she was and when she went, exclaiming with energy, as he

sprang to his feet, “Why, madam, your daughter was with me in the

train,—a little blue-eyed, brown-haired girl in black, who said she was

Captain Alling’s niece.”

“He seemed greatly excited,” Mrs. Graham wrote, “and regretted that he

did not know who you were. He got an idea somehow that your name was

_Grey_, and said he received your letter with you asleep beside him. He

is a splendid looking man, with the pleasantest eyes and the kindest

voice I ever heard or saw.”

“Ye-es,” Maude said slowly, as she recalled the voice which had spoken

so kindly to her, and the eyes which had looked so pleasantly into her

own. “And that was Max Gordon! He was going to the Cedars, and Miss

Raynor is the girl for whom he has lived single all these years. Oh-h!”

She was conscious of a vague regret that her stranger friend was the

betrothed husband of Grace Raynor, who, at that very time, was thinking

of her and fighting down a feeling as near to jealousy as it was

possible for her to harbor. In the same mail with Maude’s letter from

her mother there had come to the Cedars one from Max, who said that he

had discovered who was his _compagnon da voyage_.

“She is teaching somewhere in your town,” he wrote “and I judge is not

very happy there. Can’t you do something for her, Grace? It has

occurred to me that to have a girl like her about you would do you a

great deal of good. We are both getting on in years, and need

something young to keep us from growing old, and you might make her

your companion. She is very pretty, with a soft, cultivated voice, and

must be a good reader. Think of it, and if you decide to do it,

inquire for her at Captain Alling’s. Her name is Maude Graham.

Yours lovingly,

“MAX.”

This was Max’s letter, which Grace read as she sat in her cosy

sitting-room with every luxury around her which money could buy, from

the hot house roses on the stand beside her to the costly rug on which

her chair was standing in the ruddy glow of the cheerful grate fire. And

as she read it she felt again the cold breath which had swept over her

when Max was telling her of the young girl who had interested him so

much. And in a way Grace, too, had interested herself in Maude, and

through her maid had ascertained who she was, and that she was teaching

in the southern part of the town. And there her interest had ceased. But

it revived again on the receipt of Max’s letter and she said, “I must

see this girl first and know what she is like. A woman can judge a woman

better than a man, but I wish Max had not said what he did about our

growing old. Am I greatly changed, I wonder?”

She could manage her chair herself in the house, and wheeling it before

a long mirror, she leaned eagerly forward and examined the face

reflected there. A pale, sweet face, framed in masses of snow white

hair, which rather added to its youthful appearance than detracted from

it, although she did not think so. She had been so proud of her golden

hair, and the bitterest tears she had ever shed had been for the change

in it.

“It’s my hair,” she whispered sadly,—“hair which belongs to a woman of

sixty, rather than thirty-three, and there is a tired look about my eyes

and mouth. Yes, I am growing old, oh, Max——,” and the slender fingers

were pressed over the beautiful blue eyes where the tears came so fast.

“Yes, I’ll see the girl,” she said, “and if I like her face, I’ll take

her to please him.”

She knew there was to be an illumination on Christmas Eve in the church

on Laurel Hill, and that Maude Graham was to sing a Christmas anthem

alone.

“I’ll go, and hear, and see,” she decided, and when the evening came

Grace was there in the Raynor pew listening while Maude Graham sang, her

bright face glowing with excitement and her full, rich voice rising

higher and higher, clearer and clearer, until it filled the church as it

had never been filled before, and thrilled every nerve of the woman

watching her so intently.

“Yes, she is pretty and good, too; I cannot be deceived in that face,”

she said to herself, and when, after the services were over and Maude

came up the aisle past the pew where she was sitting, she put out her

hand and said, “Come here, my dear, and let me thank you for the

pleasure you have given me. You have a wonderful voice and some time you

must come and sing to me. I am Miss Raynor, and you are Maude Graham.”

This was their introduction to each other, and that night Maud dreamed

of the lovely face which had smiled upon her, and the voice, which had

spoken so kindly to her.

Two weeks afterwards Grace’s note was brought to her and she read it

with her feet upon the stove hearth and the low January sun shining in

upon her.

Miss Raynor wanted her for a companion and friend, to read and sing to

and soothe her in the hours of languor and depression, which were many.

“I am lonely,” she wrote, “and, as you know, wholly incapacitated from

mingling with the world, and I want some one with me different from my

maid. Will you come to me, Miss Graham? I will try to make you happy.

If money is any object I will give you twice as much as you are now

receiving, whatever that may be. Think of it and let me know your

decision soon.

“Yours very truly,

“GRACE RAYNOR.”

“Oh,” Maude cried. “Eight dollars a week and a home at the Cedars,

instead of four dollars a week and boarding around. Of course I will go,

though not till my present engagement expires. This will not be until

some time in March,” and she began to wonder if she could endure it so

long, and, now that the pressure was lifting, how she had ever borne it

at all.

But whatever may be the nature of our surroundings, time passes quickly,

and leaves behind a sense of nearly as much pleasure as pain, and when

at last the closing day of school came, it was with genuine feelings of

regret that Maude said good-bye to the pupils she had learned to love

and the patrons who had been so kind to her.

CHAPTER VII.

AT THE CEDARS.

It had cost Grace a struggle before she decided to take Maude as her

companion, and she had been driven past the little log house among the

hills and through the Bush district, that she might judge for herself of

the girl’s surroundings. The day was raw and blustering, and great banks

of snow were piled against the fences and lay heaped up in the road

unbroken save by a foot path made by the children’s feet.

“And it is through this she walks in the morning, and then sits all day

in that dingy room. I don’t believe I should like it,” Grace thought,

and that night she wrote to Maude, offering her a situation with

herself.

And now, on a lovely morning in April, when the crocuses and snowdrops

were just beginning to blossom, she sat waiting for her, wondering if

she had done well or ill for herself. She had seen Maude and talked with

her, for the latter had called at the Cedars and spent an hour or more,

and Grace had learned much from her of her former life and of Spring

Farm, which she was going to buy back. Max’s name, however, was not

mentioned, although he was constantly in the minds of both, and Grace

was wondering if he would come oftener to the Cedars if Maude were

there. She could not be jealous of the girl, and yet the idea had taken

possession of her that she was bringing her to the Cedars for Max rather

than for herself, and this detracted a little from her pleasure when she

began to fit up the room her companion was to occupy. Such a pretty room

it was, just over her own, with a bow window looking across the valley

where the lake lay sleeping, and on to the hills and the log

school-house which, had it been higher, might have been seen above the

woods which surrounded it. A room all pink and white, with roses and

lilies everywhere, and a bright fire in the grate before which a willow

chair was standing and a Maltese kitten sleeping when Maude was ushered

into it by Jane, Miss Raynor’s maid.

“Oh, it is so lovely,” Maude thought, as she looked about her, wondering

if it were not a dream from which she should presently awake.

But it was no dream, and as the days went on it came to be real to her,

and she was conscious of a deep and growing affection for the woman who

was always so kind to her and who treated her like an equal rather than

a hired companion. Together they read and talked of the books which

Maude liked best, and gradually Grace learned of the dream life Maude

had led before coming to Richland, and of the people who had deserted

her among the hills, but who in this more congenial atmosphere came

trooping back, legions of them, and crowding her brain until she had to

tell of them, and of the two lives she was living, the ideal and the

real. She was sitting on a stool at Grace’s feet, with her face flushed

with excitement as she talked of the Kimbricks, and Websters, and

Angeline Mason, who were all with her now as they had been at home, and

all as real to her as Miss Raynor was herself. Laying her hand upon the

girl’s brown curls, Grace said, half laughingly, “And so you are going

to write a book. Well, I believe all girls have some such aspiration. I

had it once, but it was swallowed up by a stronger, deeper feeling,

which absorbed my whole being.”

Here Grace’s voice trembled a little as she leaned back in her chair and

seemed to be thinking. Then, rousing herself, she asked suddenly, “How

old are you, Maude?”

“Nineteen this month,” was Maude’s reply, and Grace went on: “Just my

age when the great sorrow came. That was fourteen years ago next June. I

am thirty-three, and Max is thirty-seven.”

She said this last more to herself than to Maude, who started slightly,

for this was the first time his name had been mentioned since she came

to the Cedars.

After a moment Grace continued: “I have never spoken to you of Mr.

Gordon, although I know you have met him. You were with him on the train

from Albany to Canandaigua; he told me of you.”

“He did!” Maude exclaimed, with a ring in her voice which made Grace’s

heart beat a little faster, but she went calmly on:

“Yes; he was greatly interested in you, although he did not then know

who you were; but he knows now. He is coming here soon. We have been

engaged ever since I was seventeen and he was twenty-one; fourteen years

ago the 20th of June we were to have been married. Everything was ready;

my bridal dress and veil had been brought home, and I tried them on one

morning to see how I looked in them. I was beautiful, Max said, and I

think he told the truth; for a woman may certainly know whether the face

she sees in the mirror be pretty or not, and the picture I saw was very

fair, while he, who stood beside me, was splendid in his young manhood.

How I loved him; more, I fear, than I loved God, and for that I was

punished,—oh, so dreadfully punished. We rode together that afternoon,

Max and I, and I was wondering if there were ever a girl as happy as

myself, and pitying the women I met because they had no Max beside them,

when suddenly my horse reared, frightened by a dog, and I was thrown

upon a sharp curb-stone. Of the months of agony which followed I cannot

tell you, except that I prayed to die and so be rid of pain. The injury

was in my spine, and I have never walked in all the fourteen years

since. Max has been true to me, and would have married me had I allowed

it. But I cannot burden him with a cripple, and sometimes I wish, or

think I do, that he would find some one younger, fairer than I am, on

whom to lavish his love. He would make a wife so happy. And yet it would

be hard for me, I love him so much. Oh, Max; I don’t believe he knows

how dear he is to me.”

She was crying softly now, and Maude was crying, too; and as she

smoothed the snow-white hair and kissed the brow on which lines were

beginning to show, she said:

“He will never find a sweeter face than yours.”

To her Max Gordon now was only the betrothed husband of her mistress,

and still she found herself looking forward to his visit with a keen

interest, wondering what he would say to her, and if his eyes would

kindle at sight of her as they had done when she saw him in the church

at Laurel Hill. He was to come on the 20th, the anniversary of the day

which was to have been his bridal day, and when the morning came, Grace

said to Maude:

“I’d like to wear my wedding gown; do you think it would be too much

like Dickens’ Miss Havershaw?”

“Yes, yes,” Maude answered, quickly, feeling that faded satin and lace

of fourteen years’ standing would be sadly out of place. “You are lovely

in those light gowns you wear so much,” she said.

So Grace wore the dress which Maude selected for her; a soft, woolen

fabric of a creamy tint, with a blue shawl, the color of her eyes,

thrown around her, and a bunch of June pinks, Max’s favorite flowers, at

her belt, Then, when she was ready, Maude wheeled her out to the piazza,

where they waited for their visitor.

CHAPTER VIII.

MAX AT THE CEDARS.

The train was late that morning and lunch was nearly ready before they

saw the open carriage turn into the grounds, with Max standing up in it

and waving his hat to them.

“Oh, Maude,” Grace said, “I would give all I am worth to go and meet

him. Isn’t he handsome and grand, my Max!” she continued, as if she

would assert her right to him and hold it against the world.

But Maude did not hear her, for as Max alighted from the carriage and

came eagerly forward, she stole away, feeling that it was not for her to

witness the meeting of the lovers.

“Dear Max, you are not changed, are you?” Grace cried, extending her

arms to him, with the effort to rise which she involuntarily made so

often, and which was pitiful to see.

“Changed, darling? How could I change in less than a year?” Max

answered, as he drew her face down to his bosom and stroked her hair.

Grace was not thinking of a physical change. Indeed she did not know

what she did mean, for she was not herself conscious how strong an idea

had taken possession of her that she was losing Max. But with him there

beside her, her morbid fears vanished, and letting her head rest upon

his arm, she said:

“I don’t know, Max, only things come back to me to-day and I am thinking

of fourteen years ago and that I am fourteen years older than I was

then, and crippled and helpless and faded, while you are young as ever.

Oh, Max, stay by me till the last. It will not be for long. I am growing

so tired and sad.”

Grace hardly knew what she was saying, or why, as she said it, Maude

Graham’s face, young and fair and fresh, seemed to come between herself

and Max, any more than he could have told why he was so vaguely

wondering what had become of the girl in black, whom he had seen in the

distance quite as soon as he had seen the woman in the chair. During his

journey Grace and Maude had been pretty equally in his mind, and he was

conscious of the feeling that the Cedars held an added attraction for

him because the latter was there; and now, when he began to have a faint

perception of Grace’s meaning, though he did not associate it with

Maude, he felt half guilty because he had for a moment thought any place

where Grace was could be made pleasanter than she could make it. Taking

her face between his hands he looked at it more closely, noticing with a

pang that it had grown thinner and paler and that there were lines about

the eyes and the mouth, while the blue veins stood out full and distinct

upon the forehead. Was she slowly fading? he asked himself, resolving

that nothing should be lacking on his part to prove that she was just as

dear to him as in the days when they were young and the future bright

before them. He did not even speak of Maude until he saw her in the

distance, trying to train a refractory honeysuckle over a tall frame.

Then he said:

“Is that Miss Graham, and do you like her as well as ever?”

“Yes, better and better every day,” was Grace’s reply. “It was a little

awkward at first to have a stranger with me continually, but I am

accustomed to her now, and couldn’t part with her. She is very dear to

me,” she continued, while Max listened and watched the girl, moving

about so gracefully, and once showing her arms to the elbows as her wide

sleeves fell back in her efforts to reach the top of the frame.

“She oughtn’t to do that,” Grace said. “She is not tall enough. Go and

help her, Max,” and nothing loth, Max went along the terrace to where

Maude was standing, her face flushed with exercise as she gave him her

hand and said, “Good-morning, Mr. Gordon. I am Maude Graham. Perhaps you

remember me.”

“How could I forget you,” sprang to Max’s lips, but he said instead,

“Good-morning, Miss Graham. I have come to help you. Miss Raynor thinks

it is bad for your heart to reach so high.”

Maude could have told him that her heart had not beaten one half as fast

while reaching up as it was beating now, with him there beside her

holding the vine while she tied it to its place, his hand touching hers

and his arm once thrown out to keep her from falling as she stumbled

backward. It took a long time to fix that honeysuckle, and Max had

leisure to tell Maude of a call made upon her mother only a week before.

“Spring Farm is looking its loveliest, with the roses and lilies in

bloom,” he said, “and Angie, my sister, is enjoying it immensely. She

has filled the house with her city friends and has made some changes, of

which I think you would approve. Your mother does, but when she wanted

to cut down that apple-tree in the corner I would not let her do it. You

remember it, don’t you?”

“Oh, Mr. Gordon,” Maude exclaimed, “don’t let her touch that tree. My

play-house was under it, and there the people used to come to see me.”

He did not know who the people were, for he had never heard of Maude’s

brain children,—the Kimbricks and the Websters,—and could hardly have

understood if he had; but Maude’s voice was very pathetic and the eyes

which looked at him were full of tears, moving him strangely and making

him very earnest in his manner as he assured her that every tree and

shrub should be kept intact for her.

“You know you are going to buy it back,” he continued laughingly, as

they walked slowly toward the house where Grace was waiting to be taken

in to lunch.

“Yes, and I shall do it, too. You will see; it may be many years, but I

trust you to keep it for me,” Maude said, and he replied, “You may trust

me with anything, and I shall not disappoint you.”

The talk by the honeysuckle was one of many which took place while Max

was at the Cedars, for Grace was too unselfish to keep him chained to

her side, and insisted that he should enjoy what there was to enjoy in

the way of rides and drives in the neighborhood, and as she could not

often go with him she sent Maude in her stead, even though she knew the

danger there was in it, for she was not insensible to Max’s admiration

for the girl, or Maude’s interest in him.

“If Max is true to me to the last, and he will be, it is all I ask,” she

thought, and gave no sign of the ache in her heart, when she saw him

going from her with Maude and felt that it was in more senses than one.

“If he is happy, I am happy, too, she would say to herself, as she sat

alone hour after hour, while Max and Maude explored the country in every

direction.

Sometimes they drove together, but oftener rode, for Maude was a fine

horsewoman and never looked better than when on horseback, in the

becoming habit which Grace had given her and which fitted her admirably.

Together they went through the pleasant Richland woods, where the grass

was like a mossy carpet beneath their horses’ hoofs, and the singing of

the birds and the brook was the only sound which broke the summer

stillness, then again they galloped over the hills and round the lake,

and once through the Bush district, up to the little log house which Max

expressed a wish to see. It was past the hour for school. Teacher and

scholars had gone home, and tying their horses to the fence they went

into the dingy room and sat down side by side upon one of the wooden

benches, and just where a ray of sunlight fell upon Maude’s face and

hair, for she had removed her hat and was fanning herself with it. She

was very beautiful, with that halo around her head, Max thought, as he

sat watching and listening to her, as in answer to his question, “How

could you endure it here?” she told him of her terrible homesickness

during the first weeks of her life as a school-teacher.

“I longed so for mother and Johnnie,” she said, “and was always thinking

of them, and the dear old home, and—and sometimes—of you, too, before I

received your letter.”

“Of me!” Max said, moving a little nearer to her, while she went on:

“Yes, I’ve wanted to tell you how angry I was because you bought our

home. I wrote you something about it, you remember, but I did not tell

you half how bitter I felt. I know now you were not to blame, but I did

not think so then, and said some harsh things of you to Archie; perhaps

he told you. I said he might. Did he?”

“No,” Max answered, playing idly with the riding whip Maude held in her

hand. “No, Archie has only told me pleasant things of you. I think he is

very fond of you,” and he looked straight into Maude’s face, waiting for

her reply.

It was surely nothing to him whether Archie were fond of Maude, or she

were fond of Archie, and yet her answer was very reassuring and lifted

from his heart a little shadow resting there.

“Yes,” Maude said, without the slightest change in voice or expression.

“Archie and I are good friends. I have known him and played with him,

and quarreled with him ever since I was a child, so that he seems more

like a brother than anything else.”

“Oh, ye-es,” Max resumed, with a feeling of relief, as he let his arm

rest on the high desk behind her, so that if she moved ever so little it

would touch her.

There was in Max’s mind no thought of love-making. Indeed, he did not

know that he was thinking of anything except the lovely picture the

young girl made with the sunlight playing on her hair and the shy look

in her eyes as, in a pretty, apologetic way she told him how she had

disliked him and credited him with all the trouble which had come upon

them since her father’s death.

“Why, I thought I hated you,” she said with energy.

“Hated me! Oh, Maude, you don’t hate me now, I hope;—I could not bear

that,” Max said, letting the whip fall and taking Maude’s hand in his,

as he said again, “You don’t hate me now?”

“No, no; oh, no. I—oh, Mr. Gordon,” Maude began, but stopped abruptly,

startled by something in the eyes of the man, who had never called her

Maude before, and whose voice had never sounded as it did now, making

every nerve thrill with a sudden joy, all the sweeter, perhaps, because

she knew it must not be.

Wrenching her hand from his and springing to her feet she said, “It is

growing late, and Miss Raynor is waiting for us. Have you forgotten

_her_?”

He had forgotten her for one delirious moment, but she came back to him

with a throb of pain and self-reproach that he had allowed himself to

swerve in the slightest degree from his loyalty to her.

“I am not a man, but a traitor,” he said to himself, as he helped Maude

into her saddle and then vaulted into his own.

The ride home was a comparatively silent one, for both knew that they

had not been quite true to the woman who welcomed them back so sweetly

and asked so many questions about their ride and what they had seen.

Poor Grace; she did not in the least understand why Maude lavished so

much attention upon her that evening, or why Max lingered longer than

usual at her side, or why his voice was so tender and loving, when he at

last said good-night and went to his own room, and the self-castigation

which he knew awaited him there.

“I was a villain,” he said, as he recalled that little episode in the

school-house, when to have put his arm around Maude Graham and held her

for a moment, would have been like heaven to him. “I was false to Grace,

although I did not mean it, and, God helping me, I will never be so

again.” Then, as he remembered the expression of the eyes which had

looked up so shyly at him, he said aloud, “Could I win her, were I free?

But that is impossible. May God forgive me for the thought. Oh, why has

Grace thrown her so much in my way? She surely is to blame for that,

while I——well, I am a fool, and a knave, and a sneak.”

He called himself a great many hard names that night, and registered a

vow that so long as Grace lived, and he said he hoped she would live

forever, he would be true to her no matter how strong the temptation

placed in his way. It was a fierce battle Max fought, but he came off

conqueror, and the meeting between himself and Maude next morning was as

natural as if to neither of them had ever come a moment when they had a

glimpse of the happiness which, under other circumstances, might perhaps

have been theirs. Maude, too, had had her hours of remorse and

contrition and close questioning as to the cause of the strange joy

which had thrilled every nerve when Max Gordon called her Maude and

asked her if she hated him.

“Hate him! Never!” she thought; “but I have been false to the truest,

best woman that ever lived. She trusted her lover to me, and——”

She did not quite know what she had done, but whatever it was it should

not be repeated. There were to be no more rides, or drives, or talks

alone with Max. And when next day Grace suggested that she go with him

to an adjoining town where a fair was to be held, she took refuge in a

headache and insisted that Grace should go herself, while Max, too,

encouraged it, and tried to believe that he was just as happy with her

beside him as he would have been with the young girl who brought a

cushion for her mistress’ back and adjusted her shawl about her

shoulders and arranged her bonnet strings, and then, kissing her fondly,

said, “I am so glad that you are going instead of myself.”

This was for the benefit of Max, at whom she nodded a little defiantly,

and who understood her meaning as well as if she had put it into words.

Everything was over between them, and he accepted the situation, and

during the remainder of his stay at the Cedars, devoted himself to Grace

with an assiduity worthy of the most ardent lover. He even remained

longer than he had intended doing, for Grace was loth to let him go, and

the soft haze of early September was beginning to show on the Richland

hills when he at last said good-bye, promising to come again at

Christmas, if it were possible to do so.

CHAPTER IX.

GOOD-BYE, MAX; GOOD-BYE.

It was a cold, stormy afternoon in March. The thermometer marked six

below zero, and the snow which had fallen the day before was tossed by

the wind in great white clouds, which sifted through every crevice of

the house at the Cedars, and beat against the window from which Maude

Graham was looking anxiously out into the storm for the carriage which

had been sent to meet the train in which Max Gordon was expected. He had

not kept his promise to be with Grace at Christmas. An important lawsuit

had detained him, and as it would be necessary for him to go to London

immediately after its close, he could not tell just when he would be at

the Cedars again.

All through the autumn Grace had been failing, while a cold, taken in

November, had left her with a cough, which clung to her persistently.

Still she kept up, looking forward to the holidays, when Max would be

with her. But when she found he was not coming she lost all courage, and

Maude was alarmed to see how rapidly she failed. Nearly all the day she

lay upon the couch in her bedroom, while Maude read or sang to her or

talked with her of the book which had actually been commenced, and in

which Grace was almost as much interested as Maude herself. Grace was a

careful and discriminating critic, and if Maude were ever a success she

would owe much of it to the kind friend whose sympathy and advice were

so invaluable. A portion of every day she wrote, and every evening read

what she had written, to Grace, who smiled as she recognized Max Gordon

in the hero and knew that Maude was weaving the tale mostly from her own

experience. Even the Bush district and its people furnished material for

the plot, and more than one boy and girl who had called Maude

schoolma’am figured in its pages, while Grace was everywhere, permeating

the whole with her sweetness and purity.

“I shall dedicate it to you,” Maude said to her one day, and Grace

replied:

“That will be kind; but I shall not be here to see it, for before your

book is published I shall be lying under the flowers in Mt. Auburn. I

want you to take me there, if Max is not here to do it.”

“Oh, Miss Raynor,” Maude cried, dropping her MS. and sinking upon her

knees beside the couch where Grace was lying, “you must not talk that

way. You are not going to die. I can’t lose you, the dearest friend I

ever had. What should I do without you, and what would Max Gordon do?”

At the mention of Max’s name a faint smile played around Grace’s white

lips, and lifting her thin hand she laid it caressingly upon the girl’s

brown hair as she said:

“Max will be sorry for awhile, but after a time there will be a change,

and I shall be only a memory. Tell him I was willing, and that although

it was hard at first it was easy at the last.”

What did she mean? Maude asked herself, while her thoughts went back to

that summer afternoon in the log school-house on the hill, when Max

Gordon’s eyes and voice had in them a tone and look born of more than

mere friendship. Did Grace know? Had she guessed the truth? Maude

wondered, as, conscience-stricken, she laid her burning cheek against

the pale one upon the pillow. There was silence a moment, and when Grace

spoke again she said:

“It is nearly time for Max to be starting for Europe, or I should send

for him to come, I wish so much to see him once more before I die.”

“Do you think a hundred trips to Europe would keep him from you if he

knew you wanted him?” Maude asked, and Grace replied:

“Perhaps not. I don’t know. I only wish he were here.”

This was the last of February, and after that Grace failed so fast, that

with the hope that it might reach him before he sailed, Maude wrote to

Max, telling him to come at once, if he would see Grace before she died.

She knew about how long it would take her letter to reach him and how

long for him to come, allowing for no delays, and on the morning of the

first day when she could by any chance expect him, she sent the carriage

to the Canandaigua station, and then all through the hours of the long,

dreary day, she sat by Grace’s bedside, watching with a sinking heart

the pallor on her lips and brow, and the look she could not mistake

deepening on her face.

“What if she should die before he gets here, or what if he should not

come at all?” she thought, as the hours went by.

She was more afraid of the latter, and when she saw the carriage coming

up the avenue she strained her eyes through the blinding snow to see if

he were in it. When he came before he had stood up and waved his hat to

them, but there was no token now to tell if he were there, and she

waited breathlessly until the carriage stopped before the side entrance,

knowing then for sure that he had come.

“Thank God!” she cried, as she went out to meet him, bursting into tears

as she said to him, “I am so glad, and so will Miss Raynor be. She does

not know that I wrote you. I didn’t tell her, for fear you wouldn’t

come.”

She had given him her hand and he was holding it fast as she led him

into the hall. She did not ask him when or where he received her letter.

She only helped him off with his coat, and made him sit down by the fire

while she told him how rapidly Grace had failed and how little hope

there was that she would ever recover.

“You will help her, if anything can. I am going to prepare her now,” she

said, and, going out, she left him there alone.

He had been very sorry himself that he could not keep his promise at

Christmas, and had tried to find a few days in which to visit the Cedars

between the close of the suit and his departure for England. But he

could not, and his passage was taken and his luggage on the ship, which

was to sail early in the morning, when, about six o’clock in the

evening, Maude’s letter was brought to him, changing his plans at once.

Grace was dying,—the woman he had loved so long, and although thousands

of dollars depended upon his keeping his appointment in London, he must

lose it all, and go to her. Sending for his luggage, and writing a few

letters of explanation, the next morning found him on his way to the

Cedars, which he reached on the day when Maude expected him.

She had left Grace asleep when she went to meet Max, but on re-entering

her room found her awake and leaning on her elbow in the attitude of

intense listening.

“Oh, Maude,” she said, “was it a dream, or did I hear Max speaking to

you in the hall? Tell me is he here?”

“Yes, he is here. I sent for him and he came,” Maude replied, while

Grace fell back upon her pillow, whispering faintly:

“Bring him at once.”

“Come,” Maude said to Max, who followed her to the sick-room, where she

left him alone with Grace.

He stayed by her all that night and the day following, in order to give

Maude the rest she needed, but when the second night came they kept the

watch together, he on one side of the bed, and she upon the other, with

their eyes fixed upon the white, pinched face where the shadow of death

was settling. For several hours Grace slept quietly. Then, just as the

gray daylight was beginning to show itself in the corners of the room,

she awoke and asked:

“Where is Max?”

“Here, darling,” was his response, as he bent over her and kissed her

lips.

“I think it has grown cold and dark, for I can’t see you,” she said,

groping for his hand, which she held tightly between her own as she went

on: “I have been dreaming, Max,—such a pleasant dream, for I was young

again,—young as Maude, and wore my bridal dress, just as I did that day

when you said I was so pretty. Do you remember it? That was years

ago,—oh! so many,—and I am getting old; we both are growing old. You

said so in your letter. But Maude is young, and in my dream she wore the

bridal dress at the last, and I saw my own grave, with you beside it and

Maude, and both so sorry because I was dead. But it is better so, and I

am glad to die and be at rest. If I could be what I once was, oh! how I

should cling to life! For I love you so much! Oh, Max, do you know, can

you guess how I have loved you all these years, and what it has cost me

to give you up?”

Max’s only answer was the hot tears he dropped upon her face as she went

on: “You will not forget me, that I know; but some time,—yes, some

time,—and when it comes, remember I was willing. I told Maude so. Where

is she?”

“Here!” and Maude knelt, sobbing, by the dying woman, who went on: “She

has been everything to me, Max, and I love her next to you. God bless

you both! And if, in the Heaven I am going to, I can watch over you, I

will do it, and be often, often with you, when you think I’m far away.

Who was it said that? I read it long ago. But things are going from me,

and Heaven is very near, and the Saviour is with me,—closer, nearer than

you are, Max; and the other world is just in sight, where I soon shall

be, free from pain, with my poor, crippled feet all strong and well,

like Maude’s. Dear Maude! tell her how I loved her; tell her——”

Here her voice grew indistinct, and for a few moments she seemed to be

sleeping; then, suddenly, opening her eyes wide, she exclaimed, as an

expression of joy broke over her face: “It is here,—the glory which

shineth as the noonday. In another moment I shall be walking the golden

streets. Good-bye, Max; good-bye.”

Grace was dead, and Maude made her ready for the coffin, her tears

falling like rain upon the shrivelled feet and on the waxen hands which

she folded over the pulseless bosom, placing in them the flowers her

mistress had loved best in life. She was to be buried in Mt. Auburn, and

Maude went with the remains to Boston, as Grace had requested her to do,

caring nothing because Mrs. Marshall-More hinted broadly at the

impropriety of the act, wondering how she could have done it.

“She did it at Grace’s request, and to please me,” Max said; and that

silenced the lady, who was afraid of her brother, and a little afraid of

Maude, who did not seem quite the girl she had last seen in Merrivale.

“What will you do now? Go back to your teaching?” she asked, after the

funeral was over.

“I shall go home to mother,” Maude replied, and that afternoon she took

the train for Merrivale, accompanied by Max, who was going on to New

York, and thence to keep his appointment in London.

Few were the words spoken between them during the journey, and those

mostly of the dead woman lying under the snow at Mt. Auburn; but when

Merrivale was reached, Max took the girl’s hands and pressed them hard

as he called her a second time by her name.

“God bless you, Maude, for all you were to Grace. When I can I will

write to you. Good-bye.”

Only for a moment the train stopped at the station, and then it moved

swiftly on, leaving Maude standing upon the platform with her mother and

John, while Max resumed his seat, and pulling his hat over his eyes,

never spoke again until New York was reached. A week later and a ship of

the Cunard line was plowing the ocean to the eastward, and Max Gordon

was among the passengers, silent and abstracted, with a bitter sense of

loneliness and pain in his heart as he thought of the living and the

dead he was leaving behind,—Grace, who was to have been his bride, dead

in all her sweetness and beauty, and Maude, who was nothing to him but a

delicious memory, alive in all her freshness and youthful bloom. He

could hardly tell of which he thought the more, Grace or Maude. Both

seemed ever present with him, and it was many a day before he could rid

himself of the fancy that two faces were close against his own, one cold

and dead, as he had seen it last, with the snowy hair about the brow and

a smile of perfect peace upon the lips which had never said aught but

words of love to him,—the other glowing with life and girlish beauty, as

it had looked at him in the gathering darkness when he stood upon the

car step and waved it his good-bye.

CHAPTER X.

AT LAST.

Five years had passed since Grace was laid in her grave in Mt. Auburn,

and Max was still abroad, leading that kind of Bohemian life which many

Americans lead in Europe, when there is nothing to call them home. And

to himself Max often said there was nothing to call him home, but as

often as he said it a throb of pain belied his words, for he knew that

across the sea was a face and voice he was longing to see and hear

again, a face which now visited him in his dreams quite as often as that

of his dead love, and which he always saw as it had looked at him that

summer afternoon in the log house among the Richland hills, with the

sunlight falling upon the rings of hair, and lending a warmer tint to

the glowing cheeks. Delicious as was the memory of that afternoon, it

had been the means of keeping Max abroad during all these years, for, in

the morbid state of mind into which he had fallen after Grace’s death,

he felt that he must do penance for having allowed himself for a moment

to forget her, who had believed in him so fully.

“Grace trusted me, and I was false to her and will punish myself for it,

even if by the means I lose all that now makes life seem desirable,” he

thought.

And so he stayed on and on, year after year, knowing always just where

Maude was and what she was doing, for Archie kept him informed.

Occasionally he wrote to her himself,—pleasant, chatty letters, which

had in them a great deal of Grace,—his lost darling, he called her,—and

a little of the places he was visiting. Occasionally, too, Maude wrote

to him, her letters full of Grace, with a little of her life in

Merrivale, for she was with her mother now, and had been since Miss

Raynor’s death. A codicil to Grace’s will, bequeathing her a few

thousand dollars, made it unnecessary for her to earn her own

livelihood. Indeed, she might have bought Spring Farm, if she had liked;

but this she would not do. The money given for that must be earned by

herself, paid by the book she was writing, and which, after it was

finished and published, and after a few savage criticisms by some

dyspeptic critics, who saw no good in it, began to be read, then to be

talked about, then to sell,—until finally it became the rage and was

found in every book store, and railway car, and on almost every parlor

table in New England, while the young authoress was spoken of as “a star

which at one flight had soared to the zenith of literary fame,” and this

from the very pens which at first had denounced “Sunny Bank” as a

milk-and-watery effort, not worth the paper on which it was written.

All Mrs. Marshall-More’s guests at Spring Farm read it, and Mrs.

Marshall-More and Archie read it, too, and both went down to

congratulate the author upon her success, the latter saying to her, when

they were alone:

“I say, Maude, your prophecy came true. You told me you’d write a book

which every one would read, and which would make mother proud to say she

knew you, and, by Jove, you have done it. You ought to hear her talk to

some of the Boston people about Miss Graham, the authoress. You’d

suppose you’d been her dearest friend. I wonder what Uncle Max will say?

I told you you would make him your hero, and you have. I recognized him

at once; but the heroine is more like Grace than you. I am going to send

it to him.”

And the next steamer which sailed from New York for Europe carried with

it Maude’s book, directed to Max Gordon, who read it at one sitting in a

sunny nook of the Colosseum, where he spent a great part of his time.

Grace was in it, and he was in it, too, he was sure, and, reading

between the lines what a stranger could not read, he felt when he had

finished it that in the passionate love of the heroine for the hero he

heard Maude calling to him to come back to the happiness there was still

for him.

“And I will go,” he said. “Five years of penance have atoned for five

minutes of forgetfulness, and Grace would bid me go, if she could, for

she foresaw what would be, and told me she was willing.”

With Max to will was to do, and among the list of passengers who sailed

from Liverpool, March 20th, 18—, was the name of Maxwell Gordon, Boston,

Mass.

* * * * *

It was the 2d of April, and a lovely morning, with skies as blue and air

as soft and warm as in the later days of May. Spring Farm, for the

season, was looking its loveliest, for Mrs. Marshall-More had lavished

fabulous sums of money upon it, until she had very nearly transformed it

into what she meant it should be, an English Park. She knew that Maude

had once expressed her intention to buy it back some day, but this she

was sure she could never do, and if she could Max would never sell it,

and if he would she would never let him. So, with all these _nevers_ to

reassure her, she went on year after year improving and beautifying the

place until it was worth far more than when it came into her hands, and

she was contemplating still greater improvements during the coming

summer, when Max suddenly walked in upon her, and announced his

intention of going to Merrivale the next day.

“But where will you stay? Both houses are closed only the one at Spring

Farm has in it an old couple—Mr. and Mrs. Martin—who look after it in

the winter,” she said, and Max replied:

“I will stay at Spring Farm with the Martins. I want to see the place.”

And the next day found him there, occupying the room which, by a little

skillful questioning of Mrs. Martin, he learned had been Maude’s when

her father owned the farm.

Miss Graham was home, she said, and at once launched out into praises of

the young authoress of whom Merrivale was so proud.

“And to think,” she said, “that she was born here in this very house! It

seems so queer.”

“And is the house more honored now than when she was simple Maude

Graham?” Max asked, and the old lady replied:

“To be sure it is. Any house can have a baby born in it, but not every

one an authoress!” and with that she bustled off to see about supper for

her guest.

Max was up early the next morning, wondering how soon it would be proper

for him to call upon Maude. He had no thought that she would come to

him, and was somewhat surprised when just after breakfast her card was

brought up by Mrs. Martin, who said she was in the parlor. Maude had

heard of his arrival from Mr. Martin, who had stopped at the cottage the

previous night on his way to the village.

“Mr. Gordon in town! I supposed he was in Europe!” she exclaimed,

feeling herself grow hot and cold and faint as she thought of Max Gordon

being so near to her.

That very afternoon she had received the first check from her publisher,

and been delighted with the amount, so much more than she had expected.

There was enough to buy Spring Farm, if Max did not ask too much, and

she resolved to write to him at once and ask his price. But that was not

necessary now, for he was here and she should see him face to face, and

the next morning she started for Spring Farm immediately after their

breakfast, which was never served very early.

“Will he find me greatly changed, I wonder,” she thought, as she sat

waiting for him, her heart beating so rapidly that she could scarcely

speak when at last he came and stood before her, the same man she had

parted from five years before save that he seemed a little older, with a

look of weariness in his eyes.

But that lifted the moment they rested upon her.

“Oh, Maude,” was all he could say, as he looked into the face he had

seen so often in his dreams, though never as beautiful as it was now.

“Maude,” he began at last, “I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you

again, or how glad I am for your success. I read the book in Rome.

Archie sent it to me, and I have come to congratulate you.”

He was talking so fast and pressing her hands so hard that he almost

took her breath away. But she released herself from him, and,

determining to have the _business_ off her mind as soon as possible,

began abruptly:

“I was surprised to hear of your arrival, and glad, too, as it saves me

the trouble of writing you. I can buy Spring Farm now. You know you

promised to keep it for me. What is your price?”

“How much can you give?” Max asked; and without stopping to consider the

strangeness of the question, Maude told him frankly the size of the

check she had received, and asked if it were enough.

“No, Maude,” Max said, and over the face looking so anxiously at him

there fell a cloud of disappointment as Maude replied:

“Is it much more you ask?”

“Yes, a great deal more,” and Max seated himself beside her upon the

sofa, for she was now sitting down; “but I think you can arrange it.

Don’t look so sorry; It is _you_ I want, not your money. Will you give

me yourself in return for Spring Farm?”

He had her hands again, but she drew them from him, and covering her

face with them, began to cry, while he went on:

“Five years is a long time to wait for one we love, and I have waited

that length of time, with thoughts of you in my heart, almost as much as

thoughts of Grace, whom I loved dearly while she lived. But she is dead,

and could she speak she would bid you grant me the happiness I have been

denied so many years. I think she knew it would come some day. I am sure

she did, and she told me she was willing. I did not mean to ask you

quite so soon, but the sight of you, and the belief that you care for me

as I care for you, has made me forget all the proprieties, and I cannot

recall my words, so I ask you again to be my wife, to give me yourself

as the price of Spring Farm, which shall be your home as long as you

choose to make it so. Will you, Maude? I have come thousands of miles

for your answer, which must not be no.”

What else he said, or what she said, it is not necessary for the reader

to know; only this, that when the two walked back to the cottage Maude

said to her mother, “I am to marry Mr. Gordon in June, and you will

spend the summer in our old home, and John will go to college in the

fall.”

It was very bad taste in Max to select the 20th of June for his wedding

day, and she should suppose he would remember twenty years ago, when

Grace Raynor was to have been his bride, Mrs. Marshall-More said to

Archie, when commenting upon her brother’s approaching marriage, which

did not altogether please her. She would far rather that he should

remain single, for Archie’s sake and her own. And still it was some

comfort that she was to have for her sister one so famous as Maude was

getting to be. So she went up to Merrivale early in June and opened her

own house, and patronized Maude and Mrs. Graham, and made many

suggestions with regard to the wedding, which she would have had very

fine and elaborate had they allowed it. But Maude’s preference was for a

quiet affair, with only a few of her more intimate friends present. And

she had her way. Archie was there, of course, and made himself master of

ceremonies. He had received the news of Maude’s engagement with a keener

pang of regret than he had thought it possible for him to feel, and

suddenly woke up to a consciousness that he had always had a greater

liking for Maude than he supposed. But it was too late now, and casting

his regrets to the winds he made the best of it, and was apparently the

gayest of all the guests who, on the morning of the 20th of June,

assembled in Mrs. Graham’s parlor, where Max and Maude were made one.

Aunt Maude, Archie called her, as he kissed her and asked if she

remembered the time she cried on the neck of the brown ox, and declared

her hatred of Max and all his relations.

“But I did not know him then; did I, Max?” Maude said; and the bright

face she lifted to her husband told that she was far from hating him

now.

There was a short trip to the West and a flying visit to Richland and

the Cedars, so fraught with memories of the past and of Grace, whose

grave on the wedding day had been one mass of flowers which Max had

ordered put there. “Her wedding garment,” he said to Maude, to whom he

told what he had done. “She seems very near to me now, and I am sure she

is glad.”

* * * * *

It was a lovely July day, when Max and Maude returned from their bridal

journey and took possession of the old home at Spring Farm, where Mrs.

Graham met them with a very different expression upon her face from what

it wore when we first saw her there years ago. The place was hers again,

to enjoy as long as she lived; and if it had been beautiful when she

left it, she found it far more so now, for Mrs. Marshall-More’s

improvements, for which Max’s money had paid, were mostly in good taste,

and never had the grounds looked better than when Max and Maude drove

into them on this July afternoon. Although a little past their prime,

there were roses everywhere, and the grassy walks, which Mrs. More had

substituted in place of gravel, were freshly cut, and smooth and soft as

velvet, while the old-fashioned flowers Maude loved so well, were

filling the air with their perfume, and the birds in the maple tree

seemed carolling a welcome to the bride so full were they of song.

And here we shall leave her, happy in her old home and in her husband’s

love, which is more to her than all the world beside. Whether she will

ever write another book we do not know, probably she will, for where the

brain seeds have taken root it is hard to dislodge them, and Maude often

hears around her the voices of new ideal friends, to whom she may some

time be compelled to give shape and name, as she did to the friends of

her childhood.

THE HEPBURN LINE.

CHAPTER I.—DORIS’S STORY.

MY AUNTS.

I had come from my mother’s burial to the rector’s house, where I was to

stay until it should be known what disposition would be made of me by my

father’s aunts, the Misses Morton, who lived at Morton Park, near

Versailles, Kentucky. Of these aunts I knew little, except that there

were three of them now, but there had been four, and my

great-grandfather, an eccentric old man, had called them respectively,

Keziah, Desire, Maria and Beriah which odd names he had shortened into

Kizzy and Dizzy, Rier and Brier. My father, who had lived with them when

a boy, had often talked of Morton Park, and once when he was telling me

of the grand old house, with its wide piazza and Corinthian pillars, its

handsome grounds and the troop of blacks ready to come at his call, I

had asked him why he didn’t go back there, saying I should like it

better than our small cottage, where there were no grounds and no

Corinthian pillars and no blacks to wait upon us. For a moment he did

not answer, but glanced at my mother with a look of unutterable

tenderness, then, drawing us both closely to him, he said, “If I go

there I must leave you behind; and I would rather have mamma and you

than all the blacks and Corinthian pillars in the world.”