Madge Morton's Secret

by Amy D. V. Chalmers

Madge's eyes were misty. The thought of her mother and father made it hard for her to speak without emotion. "Besides," she added, smiling in her charming fashion, "I will never wear a pink gown. No one need try to persuade me. It wouldn't be in keeping with my red hair!"

Eleanor put her arm around her cousin. She understood the little quaver in Madge's laughing voice.

"Of course I will have the dress, if you feel that way about it," she said gently. "And I shall adore it. Why, I can see myself in it this minute, with a pink rose fastened in my hair. But all this time you and I have been arguing Mother has not yet said that you could use the silks. Please consent, Mother; there's a dear."

Mrs. Butler looked grave. "I suppose it is all right," she hesitated. "The silks belong to Madge and she is old enough to decide what she wishes to do with them. Look in my left-hand bureau drawer, Madge; you will find the key to your mother's trunk there. The silks are in the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a piece of old, yellow muslin. We might as well find out whether the material is still good before we decide what we will do about it. I must go back now to my jelly; it must be nearly done."

"Come up to the attic with me, won't you, Eleanor?" invited Madge.

Eleanor shook her head. She knew her cousin liked best to make these visits to her mother's trunk alone. "No," she answered, "I must help Mother with the jelly."

Nellie slipped quietly away and left Madge looking dreamily out on the elm-shaded lawn, her thoughts busy with the story of her own past and the little she knew of her father.

He had been a captain in the United States Navy, and one of the youngest officers in the service. The Mortons were an old Virginia family, and after Robert Morton's graduation from Annapolis he was rapidly promoted in the service. He had married Mrs. Butler's only sister, Eleanor, for whom Nellie was named. Two months after Madge's birth, while her husband was away on a cruise, Madge's mother died at her sister's home, and, as her father never came back to claim her, she had been brought up by her uncle and aunt. This was all she had been told of the story of her mother and father. It made her aunt unhappy to talk of them, so Madge had asked few questions as she grew to young womanhood. But to-day she felt that she would like to know whether her father had died and been buried at sea—she always thought of him as dead—or whether a tablet had ever been erected to his memory at Annapolis. She had never been to Annapolis, although it was not a great distance from Miss Tolliver's school, but she knew that the Government often honored its brave officers and sailors with these memorials.

She was thinking of these things as she left the dining room and climbed the steep, ladder-like stairs that led to the attic. The attic of "Forest House" was worth a longer journey than Madge had to make. It was built of solid cedar wood, with beams a foot thick over head, and put together with great cedar pegs. The attic was a long, low-ceilinged room, dark and fragrant with the odor of the cedar. It was lit by four big, old-fashioned dormer windows in the front and four in the rear.

Her mother's trunk was kept in one corner of the attic behind an old oak chest. Mrs. Butler did not wish to be haunted by sad memories when she made her frequent trips to her attic to look after the family clothing and bedding, so she had partly hidden her sister's trunk.