“If I could only go back to dear old Uncle John,” she sighed. “His love has never failed me.”
It seemed long years back since she had romped with him, a happy, merry child, over the cotton fields, and he had called her his sunbeam during all those years when no one lived at Whitestone Hall and the wild ivy climbed riotously over the windows and doors. Even Septima’s voice would have sounded so sweet to her. She would have lived over again those happy, childish days, if she only could. She remembered how Septima would send her to the brook for water, and how she sprinkled every flower in the path-way that bore her name; and how Septima would scold her when she returned with her 125 bucket scarce half full; and how she had loved to dream away those sunny summer days, lying under the cool, shady trees, listening to the songs the robins sang as they glanced down at her with their little sparkling eyes.
How she had dreamed of the gallant young hero who was to come to her some day. She had wondered how she would know him, and what were the words he first would say! If he would come riding by, as the judge did when “Maud Muller stood in the hay-fields;” and she remembered, too, the story of “Rebecca at the Well.” A weary smile flitted over her face as she remembered when she went to the brook she had always put on her prettiest blue ribbons, in case she might meet her hero.
Oh, those sweet, bright, rosy dreams of girlhood! What a pity it is they do not last forever! Those girlish dreams, where glowing fancy reigns supreme, and the prosaic future is all unknown. She remembered her meeting with Rex, how every nerve in her whole being thrilled, and how she had felt her cheeks grow flaming hot, just as she had read they would do when she met the right one. That was how she had known Rex was the right one when she had shyly glanced up, from under her long eyelashes, into the gay, brown hazel eyes, fixed upon her so quizzically, as he took the heavy basket from her slender arms, that never-to-be-forgotten June day, beneath the blossoming magnolia-tree.
Poor child! her life had been a sad romance since then. How strange it was she was fleeing from the young husband whom she had married and was so quickly parted from!
All this trouble had come about because she had so courageously rescued her letter from Mme. Whitney.
“If he had not bound me to secrecy, I could have have cried out before the whole world I was his wife,” she thought.
A burning flush rose to her face as she thought how cruelly he had suspected her, this poor little child-bride who had never known one wrong or sinful thought in her pure, innocent young life.
If he had only given her the chance of explaining how she had happened to be there with Stanwick; if they had taken her back she must have confessed about the letter and who Rex was and what he was to her.
Even Stanwick’s persecution found an excuse in her innocent, unsuspecting little heart.