“I expect you think queer of me to write you so soon. I ain’t much on writing you know, but something happened right after you leaving and has kept right on happening that made me feel I kinder like to tell you. Don’t you mind the mistakes I make. I’m thankful to goodness you ain’t the school teacher or I’d never write ‘slong s’ I’m living, but ennyhow I’m going to tell you all about it.
“The night you went away I was standing down by the gate under the old elm. I had on my best things yet from the wedding, and I hated to go in and have the day over and have to begin putting on my old calico [to-morrow] morning again, and washing dishes just the same. Seemed as if I couldn’t bear to have the world just the same now you was gone away. Well, I heard someone coming down the street, and who do you think it was? Why, Hanford Weston. He came right up to the gate and stopped. I don’t know’s he ever spoke two words to me in my life except that time he stopped the big boys from snow-balling me and told me to run along quick and git in the school-house while he fit ’em. Well, he stopped and spoke, and he looked so sad, seemed like I knew just what he was feeling sad about, and I told him all about you getting married instead of your sister. He looked at me like he couldn’t move for a while and his face was as white as that marble man in the cemetery over Squire Hancock’s grave. He grabbed the gate real hard and I thought he was going to fall. He couldn’t even move his lips for a while. I felt just awful sorry for him. Something came in my throat like a big stone and my eyes got all blurred with the moonlight. He looked real handsome. I just couldn’t help thinking you ought to see him. Bimeby he got his voice back again, and we talked a lot about you. He told me how he used to watch you when you was a little girl wearing pantalettes. You used to sit in the church pew across from his father’s and he could just see your big eyes over the top of the door. He says he always thought to himself he would marry you when he grew up. Then when you began to go to school and was so bright he tried hard to study and keep up just to have you think him good enough for you. He owned up he was a bad speller and he’d tried his level best to do better but it didn’t seem to come natural, and he thought maybe ef he was a good farmer you wouldn’t mind about the spelling. He hired out to his father for the summer and he was trying with all his might to get to be the kind of man t’would suit you, and then when he was plowing and planning all what kind of a house with big [columns] to the front he would build here comes the coach driving by and you in it! He said he thought the sky and fields was all mixed up and his heart was going out of him. He couldn’t work any more and he started out after supper to see what it all meant.
“That wasn’t just the exact way he told it, Marsh, it was more like poetry, that kind in our reader about “Lord Ullin’s daughter”—you know. We used to recite it on examination exhibition. I didn’t know Hanford could talk like that. His words were real pretty, kind of sorrowful you know. And it all come over me that you ought to know about it. You’re married of course, and can’t help it now, but ’taint every girl that has a boy care for her like that from the time she’s a baby with a red hood on, and you ought to know ’bout it, fer it wasn’t Hanford’s fault he didn’t have time to tell you. He’s just been living fer you fer a number of years, and its kind of hard on him. ’Course you may not care, being you’re married and have a fine house and lots of clo’es of your own and a good time, but it does seem hard for him. It seems as if somebody ought to comfort him. I’d like to try if you don’t mind. He does seem to like to talk about you to me, and I feel so sorry for him I guess I could comfort him a little, for it seems as if it would be the nicest thing in the world to have some one like you that way for years, just as they do in books, only every time I think about being a comfort to him I think he belongs to you and it ain’t right. So Marsh, you just speak out and say if your willing I should try to comfort him a little and make up to him fer what he lost in you, being as you’re married and fixed so nice yourself.
“Of course I know I aint pretty like you, nor can’t hold my head proud and step high as you always did, even when you was little, but I can feel, and perhaps that’s something. Anyhow Hanford’s been down three times to talk about you to me, and ef you don’t mind I’m going to let him come some more. But if you mind the leastest little bit I want you should say so, for things are mixed in this world and I don’t want to get to trampling on any other person’s feelings, much less you who have always been my best friend and always will be as long as I live I guess. ’Member how we used to play house on the old flat stone in the orchard, and you give me all the prettiest pieces of china with sprigs on ’em? I aint forgot that, and never will. I shall always say you made the prettiest bride I ever saw, no matter how many more I see, and I hope you won’t forget me. It’s lonesome here without you. If it wasn’t for comforting Hanford I shouldn’t care much for anything. I can’t think of you a grown up woman. Do you feel any different? I spose you wouldn’t climb a fence nor run through the pasture lot for anything now. Have you got a lot of new friends? I wish I could see you. And now Marsh, I want you to write right off and tell me what to do about comforting Hanford, and if you’ve any message to send to him I think it would be real nice. I hope you’ve got a good husband and are happy.
“From your devoted and loving school mate,
“Mary Ann Fothergill.”
Marcia laid down the letter and buried her face in her hands. To her too had come a thrust which must search her life and change it. So while David wrestled with his sorrow Marcia entered upon the knowledge of her own heart.
There was something in this revelation by Mary Ann of Hanford Weston’s feelings toward her that touched her immeasurably. Had it all happened before she left home, had Hanford come to her and told her of his love, she would have turned from him in dismay, almost disgust, and have told him that they were both but children, how could they talk of love. She could never have loved him. She would have felt it instantly, and her mocking laugh might have done a good deal toward saving him from sorrow. But now, with miles between them, with the wall of the solemn marriage vows to separate them forever, with her own youth locked up as she supposed until the day of eternity should perhaps set it free, with no hope of any bright dream of life such as girls have, could she turn from even a school boy’s love without a passing tenderness, such as she would never have felt if she had not come away from it all? Told in Mary Ann’s blunt way, with her crude attempts at pathos, it reached her as it could not otherwise. With her own new view of life she could sympathize better with another’s disappointments. Perhaps her own loneliness gave her pity for another. Whatever it was, Marcia’s heart suddenly turned toward Hanford Weston with a great throb of gratitude. She felt that she had been loved, even though it had been impossible for that love to be returned, and that whatever happened she would not go unloved down to the end of her days. Suddenly, out of the midst of the perplexity of her thoughts, there formed a distinct knowledge of what was lacking in her life, a lack she had never felt before, and probably would not have felt now had she not thus suddenly stepped into a place much beyond her years. It seemed to the girl as she sat in the great chintz chair and read and re-read that letter, as if she lived years that afternoon, and all her life was to be changed henceforth. It was not that she was sorry that she could not go back, and live out her girlhood and have it crowned with Hanford Weston’s love. Not at all. She knew, as well now as she ever had known, that he could never be anything to her, but she knew also, or thought she knew, that he could have given her something, in his clumsy way, that now she could never have from any man, seeing she was David’s and David could not love her that way, of course.
Having come to this conclusion, she arose and wrote a letter giving and bequeathing to Mary Ann Fothergill all right, title, and claim to the affections of Hanford Weston, past, present, and future—sending him a message calculated to smooth his ruffled feelings, with her pretty thanks for his youthful adoration; comfort his sorrow with the thought that it must have been a hallucination, that some day he would find his true ideal which he had only thought he had found in her; and send him on his way rejoicing with her blessings and good wishes for a happy life. As for Mary Ann, for once she received her meed of Marcia’s love, for homesick Marcia felt more tenderness for her than she had ever been able to feel before; and Marcia’s loving messages set Mary Ann in a flutter of delight, as she laid her plans for comforting Hanford Weston.