Away to the northward among the New England hills there is a forsaken grave, where the inebriated Rudolph sleeps. His thirst for revenge is over and the forlorn girl who, in her mother’s kitchen washes the dinner dishes for college students just as she used to when Frederic Raymond was a boarder there, has nothing to dread from him. Mrs. Huntington’s house on the river has been sold to cancel the mortgage, and in the city of Elms she has returned to her old vocation, and Isabel, with her broken nose and ugly scar has scarcely a hope, that among her mother’s boarders there will ever one be found weak enough to offer her his hand. An humbled, and it is to be hoped, a better woman, she derives her greatest comfort from the letters which sometimes come to her from Marian, and which usually contain a more substantial token of regard than mere words convey.
One word now of William Gordon and our story is done. Ben had claimed the privilege of writing the news to him, and he did it in his characteristic way, first touching upon the note which, he said, was safe in his wallet and sure of being paid, then launching out into glowing descriptions of Marian’s happiness with Frederic.
This letter was a long time in finding Will, and the answer did not reach Redstone Hall until the family had returned from their summer residence at Riverside. Then it came to them one warm November day, just as the sun was setting, and its mellow rays fell upon the group assembled upon the piazza. Frederic, to whom it was directed, broke the seal and read the sincere congratulations which his early friend had sent to him from over the sea,—read, too, that ‘mid the vine-clad hills of Bingen, in a cottage looking out upon the Rhine, there was a fair-haired German girl, with eyes like Marian Grey, and that when Will came next to America he would not be alone.
“For this fair-haired German girl,” he wrote, “has promised to come with me. I have told her of my former love, and when last night I read to her Ben’s letter, the tears glistened in her lustrous eyes as she whispered in her broken English tongue, ‘God bless sweet Marian Grey,’ and I, too, Fred, from a full heart respond the same, God bless sweet Marian Grey, the Heiress of Redstone Hall.”
“There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will know as well what to expect from the one as the other.”—Butler.
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