“Write to me at once, darling,” he added in conclusion, “and tell me yes, as I know you will, unless I have been most cruelly deceived.”
“I will write to him this very night,” she said, “but I will show this to Oliver first. I am sure he is anxious to know if it came,” and pressing it to her lips she went flying down to the gable-roof.
Hepsy was not this time on guard, and gliding up the stairs Mildred burst into the room where Oliver lay, partially propped up in bed, so that he could see the fading sunlight shining on the river and on the hill-tops beyond.
“It’s come, Oliver, it’s come!” she exclaimed, holding the letter to view.
“I am glad for your sake, Milly,” said Oliver, a deep flush stealing over his face, for he felt instinctively that he was about to be called upon to pass a painful ordeal.
“I wouldn’t show it to anybody else,” she continued: “and I can’t even read it to you myself; neither can I stay here while you read it, for, somehow, I should blush, and grow so hot and fidgety, so I’ll leave it with you a few minutes while I take a run down to the tree where Lawrence found me sleeping that Sunday,” and thrusting the letter into his hand, she hurried out, stumbling over and nearly upsetting Hepsy, who was shelling peas by the open door.
“Oh, the Lord!” groaned the old lady, “you’ve trod on my very biggest corn,” and the lamentations she made over her aching toe, she forgot to go up and see “if the jade had worried Oliver,” who was thus left to himself, as he wished to be.
He would not for the world have opened that letter. He could not read how much Mildred Howell was beloved by another than himself, and he let it lay just where it had dropped from his nerveless fingers.
“Why will she torture me so?” he cried. “Why does she come to me day after day with her bright face, and her words of love which sound so much like mockery, and yet ’tis far better thus than to have her know my wicked secret. She would hate me then,—would loathe me in my deformity just as I loathe myself. Oh, why didn’t I die years ago, when we were children together, and I had not learned what it was to be a cripple!”
He held up in the sunlight the feet which his dead mother used to pity and kiss,—he turned them round,—took them in his hands, and while his tears dropped fast upon them, he whispered mournfully: “This is the curse which stands between me and Mildred Howell. Were it not for this, I would have won her love ere Lawrence Thornton came with his handsome face and pleasant ways; but it cannot be. She will be his bride, and he will cherish her long years after the grass is growing green over poor, forgotten Clubs!”