“Yes, she’s beautiful, oh! so beautiful, and happy, too. I wish I had been like her. I wish—” and Maddy burst into a most uncontrollable fit of weeping, her tears dropping like rain upon the inanimate features of Lucy Atherstone.
Guy looked at her amazed, his own heart throbbing with a keen pang of something undefinable as he listened to her stormy weeping. What did ail her? he wondered. Could it be that the evil against which he was providing had really come upon her? Was Maddy more interested in him than he supposed? He hoped not, though with a man’s vanity he felt a slight thrill of satisfaction in thinking that it might be so. Guy knew this feeling was not worthy of him, and he struggled to cast it off, while he asked Maddy why she cried.
Child as she was, the real cause of her tears never entered her brain, and she answered:
“I can’t tell why, unless I was thinking how different Miss Atherstone is from me. She’s rich and handsome. I am poor and homely, and—”
“No, Maddy, you are not;” and Guy interrupted her.
Gently lifting up her head, he smoothed back her hair, and keeping a hand on each side of her face, said, pleasantly:
“You are not homely. I think you quite as pretty as Lucy; I do, really,” he continued, as her eyes kindled at the compliment. “I am going to write to her to-night, and shall tell her more about you. I want you to like each other very much when she comes, so that you may live with us. Aikenside would not be Aikenside without you, Maddy.”
In all his wooings of Lucy Atherstone, Guy’s voice had never been tenderer in its tone than when he said this to Maddy, whose lip quivered again, and who involuntarily laid her head now upon his knee as she cried a second time, not noisily, but quietly, softly, as if this crying did her good. For several minutes they sat there thus, the nature of their thoughts known only to each other, for neither spoke, until Maddy, half ashamed of her emotions, lifted up her head, and said:
“I do not know what made me cry, only I’d been so happy here that I guess I’d come to think that you only liked Jessie and me. Of course I knew that some time you would see and think all the world of somebody else, but I did not expect it so soon. I am afraid Miss Atherstone will not fancy me, and I know most I shall not feel as free here, after she comes, as I do now. Then your being so good, sending me to school, helped me to cry more, and so I was very foolish. Don’t tell Miss Atherstone that I cried. Tell her, though, how beautiful she is, and how glad I am that she loves you, and is going to be your wife.”
Maddy’s voice was very steady in its tone. She evidently meant what she said, but Guy, the bad man, did not feel as graciously as he ought to have felt in knowing that Maddy Clyde was glad “Lucy loved him, and was to be his wife.”