“Then you know the family,” said Will, in some surprise.
“I know of them,” returned Marian, “for Ben was so much interested in the blind girl that after his return he talked of little else.”
“You have never seen them youself, of course,” and taking this fact for granted, Will proceeded to give her a most minute description of Redstone Hall, of its master, and of herself as she was when he visited Kentucky.
Frederic’s marriage was then touched upon. Will telling how angry his chum used to be when he received a letter on the subject from his father.
“We were studying law together,” he said, “and, as we were room-mates in college, it was quite natural that we should confide in each other; so he used to tell me of his father’s project, and almost swear he wouldn’t do it. I never was more astonished than when I heard he was to be married in a few days. ‘It’s all over with me,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t help it!’ and he signed himself ‘Your wretched Fred!’ But what are you crying for, Miss Grey? You certainly are. What is the matter?”
“I am crying for her—for poor Marian Lindsey!” was the answer; and Marian’s tears flowed faster.
Will Gordon was distressed at the sight of woman’s tears, but particularly at the sight of Marian Grey’s, and he tried to console her by saying he was sure Mr. Raymond would sometime find his wife, and they all would be the happier for what they both had suffered. Involuntarily he had touched the right chord, for, in listening to his predictions of future good, which should come to Frederic Raymond’s wife, Marian Grey ceased to weep, and when, ere his departure, Will asked her for some music, she gave him one of those stirring pieces she always played when her heart was running over with happy anticipations!
Will Gordon was older than Frederic Raymond, and an examination of the family Bible would have shown him to be thirty. Quite a bachelor, his sister Ellen said, and she marveled that he had lived thus long without taking to himself a wife. But Will was very fastidious in his ideas of females, and though he had traveled much, both in Europe and his own country, he had never seen a face which could hold his fancy for a moment, until the sunny blue eyes of Marian Grey shone upon him and thawed the ice which had laid about his heart so many years. Even then he did not quite understand the feeling, or know how it was that night after night he found himself locked out at home, while morning after morning his sister Ellen scolded him for staying out so late, wondering what attraction he could find at Mary’s, when he knew as well as she that he would never disgrace the Gordon family by marrying a governess, and a peddler’s adopted sister, too! Will hardly thought he should either. He didn’t quite know what ailed him, and in a letter written to Frederic, who was now in Kentucky, he gave an analysis of his feelings, after having first told him that Marian Grey was the adopted sister of a Yankee peddler, who had once visited Redstone Hall, and who, he was sure, Frederic would remember for his oddities.
“I wish you could see this girl,” he wrote, “I’d like to have your opinion, for I know you are a connoisseur in everything pertaining to female charms, but I am sure you never in all your life saw anything like Marian Grey. I never did, and I have seen the proudest court beauties in Europe—but nobody like her. And yet it is not so much the exceeding fairness of her complexion, or the perfect regularity of her features, as it is the indescribably fascinating something which demands your pity as well as your admiration. There is that about her mouth, and in her smile, which seems to say that she has suffered as few have ever done, and that from this suffering she has risen purified, beautified, and if I may be allowed a term which my good mother would call wicked in the extreme, glorified as it were!
“Just picture to yourself a graceful, airy figure, five feet four inches high—then clothe it in black, and adapt every article of dress exactly to her form and style, then imagine a rose-bud face, which I cannot describe, with the deepest, saddest, brightest, merriest, sunniest, laughing blue eyes you ever saw. You see there is a slight contradiction of words, but every one by turns will apply to her eyes of blue. Then her hair—oh, Fred, words fail me here. It’s a mixture of everything—brown, black, yellow, and red. Yes, red—I mean it, for it has decidedly a reddish hue in the sunshine. By gas-light it is brown, and by daylight a most beautiful chesnut or auburn—rippling all over her head in glossy waves, and curling about her forehead and neck.