“He seemed greatly excited,” Mrs. Graham wrote, “and regretted that he did not know who you were. He got an idea somehow that your name was Grey, and said he received your letter with you asleep beside him. He is a splendid looking man, with the pleasantest eyes and the kindest voice I ever heard or saw.”
“Ye-es,” Maude said slowly, as she recalled the voice which had spoken so kindly to her, and the eyes which had looked so pleasantly into her own. “And that was Max Gordon! He was going to the Cedars, and Miss Raynor is the girl for whom he has lived single all these years. Oh-h!”
She was conscious of a vague regret that her stranger friend was the betrothed husband of Grace Raynor, who, at that very time, was thinking of her and fighting down a feeling as near to jealousy as it was possible for her to harbor. In the same mail with Maude’s letter from her mother there had come to the Cedars one from Max, who said that he had discovered who was his compagnon da voyage.
“She is teaching somewhere in your town,” he wrote “and I judge is not very happy there. Can’t you do something for her, Grace? It has occurred to me that to have a girl like her about you would do you a great deal of good. We are both getting on in years, and need something young to keep us from growing old, and you might make her your companion. She is very pretty, with a soft, cultivated voice, and must be a good reader. Think of it, and if you decide to do it, inquire for her at Captain Alling’s. Her name is Maude Graham.
Yours lovingly,
“Max.”
This was Max’s letter, which Grace read as she sat in her cosy sitting-room with every luxury around her which money could buy, from the hot house roses on the stand beside her to the costly rug on which her chair was standing in the ruddy glow of the cheerful grate fire. And as she read it she felt again the cold breath which had swept over her when Max was telling her of the young girl who had interested him so much. And in a way Grace, too, had interested herself in Maude, and through her maid had ascertained who she was, and that she was teaching in the southern part of the town. And there her interest had ceased. But it revived again on the receipt of Max’s letter and she said, “I must see this girl first and know what she is like. A woman can judge a woman better than a man, but I wish Max had not said what he did about our growing old. Am I greatly changed, I wonder?”
She could manage her chair herself in the house, and wheeling it before a long mirror, she leaned eagerly forward and examined the face reflected there. A pale, sweet face, framed in masses of snow white hair, which rather added to its youthful appearance than detracted from it, although she did not think so. She had been so proud of her golden hair, and the bitterest tears she had ever shed had been for the change in it.
“It’s my hair,” she whispered sadly,—“hair which belongs to a woman of sixty, rather than thirty-three, and there is a tired look about my eyes and mouth. Yes, I am growing old, oh, Max——,” and the slender fingers were pressed over the beautiful blue eyes where the tears came so fast. “Yes, I’ll see the girl,” she said, “and if I like her face, I’ll take her to please him.”
She knew there was to be an illumination on Christmas Eve in the church on Laurel Hill, and that Maude Graham was to sing a Christmas anthem alone.