Molly's treachery

By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
HART SERIES NO. 62
COPYRIGHT 1886 BY GEO. MUNRO
Published By THE ARTHUR WESTBROOK COMPANY Cleveland, O., U. S. A.
Printed in the United States of America
“Ferndale, Greenbrier Co., West Va. June 20, 1878.
“Dear sister and Aunt Lucy, oh, please do let me come home! Ferndale is horrid, the lonesomest old hole I ever saw in my life, and Aunt Thalia is a real old dragoness! And I’m tired of behaving like a grown-up lady, and just dying for some sort of a lark. And although I don’t like her much, I hate to fool her as I’m doing. It makes me feel mean as if I were a regular little fraud. I try to keep it up for your sake, Lou, but it goes hard. Bother the money! It isn’t worth the deceit, or, as our old French governess used to say, ‘ Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle! ’ Can’t you let me off now? I’ve been here two weeks, and I don’t think I can stand it any longer! It’s like a catacomb, so deadly lonesome! Not a caller since I came, and I haven’t seen a man for two weeks except the gardener and the old black coach driver! But that’s all the better, since my clothes are shabby anyhow! I think Aunt Thalia must have noticed that my red cashmere is out at elbows, for this morning she actually gave me forty dollars, and told me to go into town and buy myself a summer silk and her maid would make it for me this week. But I’m going to post this letter to you instead with the money registered to you (as you told me to do). I expect she will be fearfully angry when she finds it out. No doubt she will want to drive me away, so you had better send a telegram right off for me to come home. Say that Aunt Lucy’s sick, or somebody’s dying—anything—so that you get me away at once and forever from Ferndale! I shall die of the blues if I stay any longer! With love to you both,
“Molly E. Trueheart.”
“To Miss Louise Barry, “Staunton, Va.”
The Ferndale estate did not deserve the title “horrid old hole,” as applied to it in that gushing, school-girlish letter. On the contrary it was a magnificent place of about a hundred acres—a valley farm, situated a few miles distant from the historic old town of Lewisburg, and less than six miles distant from the Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs. The large, old-fashioned red brick mansion was almost hidden by a far-spreading grove of gigantic old forest trees, beneath whose shade, dark and damp and heavy, flourished the splendid ferns that gave the place its distinctive name. But after all, perhaps the dense shade and unavoidable dampness made the old house unwholesome, for old Mrs. Barry, its mistress, was an aged, withered crone, little more than skin and bones, with a temper none of the sweetest, and her servants as a whole were sour-tempered too, as if they did not get enough sunshine on their faces and into their souls. It was this subtle influence perhaps that made Mrs. Barry’s young guest vow to herself that she should go melancholy mad if she stayed much longer at Ferndale.