Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales

by Mary Jane Holmes

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.”

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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.