"Your loving
"Marion."
CHAPTER XXVI.
"If thou art worn and hard beset,
With troubles that thou would'st forget,
If thou would'st read a lesson that will keep
Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,
Go to the woods and hills! No tears
Dim the sweet look that Nature wears."
—H. W. Longfellow.
Grace was in deep perplexity. She pondered her problem over and over, and though in reality she felt more like flinging pride to the winds than ever before, she was not able to formulate or even consciously name her thoughts. A strange, unsettled feeling possessed her. She wondered at herself that she did not contemptuously throw this letter of Leon Carrington's into the fire, as she had the other two, but for some reason did not do so. All night she was uneasy and slept but little. The next morning she announced to Kate that she would spend the day at Rosewood, sketching.
What the trouble was, Kate could only surmise, but wisely held her peace feeling instinctively that now was no time for questions. She was relieved to hear of the prospective recreation, for Grace always came back from these trips with so much fresh inspiration, and renewed enthusiasm.
It was a beautiful day, one of those mild, hazy days of October that seem made to teach humanity some of its most sacred lessons. Nature is the best of teachers if we know how to read her mystic pages, her many and varied beauties, her wide diversities of expression, her fine subtlety of language, for she is the handmaid of Truth, inasmuch as she holds before our admiring eyes pictures of Truth and its wondrous laws. If we can interpret the pictures, we are wiser and better and happier.
Grace was ever ready to listen to the oracles of nature, but now they held a sweeter message than ever before, and she keenly anticipated the pleasure in store for her as she seated herself in the car and disposed of her sketching materials for the half hour's ride to Rosewood, a pretty little woodland station near Hampton.
She generally walked the mile and a half to the farmhouse in the edge of the woods, where she had made the acquaintance of a kind hearted old lady, who loaned her a great Newfoundland dog belonging to the house, for company in her rambles.