“Here it is.” The old lady lifted it from the box with a sadly reverent air; handed it to Marjorie. She accepted it, saying nothing. “It is a love story you are going to read in this old black book, Marvelous Manager; the love story of your friend, Brooke Hamilton. He was a marvelous manager, too, child. There was only one thing he did not know how to manage. That was his heart.”
CHAPTER XVII.
BROOKE HAMILTON’S ANGELA
Marjorie looked from Miss Susanna to the portrait and back again. The mistress of the Arms was eyeing the portrait, too, with an expression of dark melancholy.
“There’s no use in my staying here to talk with you about this journal, child. I’ve read it several times and almost cried my eyes out over it. In fact, I don’t want to talk about it at all. I’m going. After you have read it, I’ll have something else to say. Not until then.”
“Thank you, Miss Susanna,” Marjorie had only time to call after the sturdy little woman as the latter hurried from the room, furtively wiping her eyes with her hem-stitched handkerchief.
The young girl, who stood on the threshold of life and love, even as Brooke Hamilton had once stood, was equally the stranger to love that he had been. Marjorie regarded the black leather book with a glance of timid fascination. Between the loose black covers, broken apart from much handling, in that small space, was the record of a love which had not been a happy one. Over a happy love idyl Miss Susanna would never have “almost cried her eyes out.”
She understood that her remark at the breakfast table concerning her lack of material for ‘Inspiration’ had set the question of the giving of the journal to her going again in Miss Susanna’s mind. Marjorie felt as though she stood on the brink of the unknown. The love story of Brooke Hamilton could not but be different from that of any of which she had read or heard.
She swept aside the pad of paper on which she had been writing and carefully laid the journal on the table before her. Slowly she removed the wide rubber band and opened the book to the first page. There in his clear handwriting stood a foreword:
“May 1,” it began. “This is my birthday, though not even the servants know it. Well, I have purchased myself a gift; this black book. It shall not be a black book in an evil sense. It shall only record my doings which I shall hope to make ever of purpose and right. Should I live to be a very old man this journal will preserve for me facts which memory will have long grown weary of holding. I shall call this book a present from my mother. I do not approve of making presents to myself.”