CHAPTER VII.
AT THE CEDARS.
It had cost Grace a struggle before she decided to take Maude as her companion, and she had been driven past the little log house among the hills and through the Bush district, that she might judge for herself of the girl’s surroundings. The day was raw and blustering, and great banks of snow were piled against the fences and lay heaped up in the road unbroken save by a foot path made by the children’s feet.
“And it is through this she walks in the morning, and then sits all day in that dingy room. I don’t believe I should like it,” Grace thought, and that night she wrote to Maude, offering her a situation with herself.
And now, on a lovely morning in April, when the crocuses and snowdrops were just beginning to blossom, she sat waiting for her, wondering if she had done well or ill for herself. She had seen Maude and talked with her, for the latter had called at the Cedars and spent an hour or more, and Grace had learned much from her of her former life and of Spring Farm, which she was going to buy back. Max’s name, however, was not mentioned, although he was constantly in the minds of both, and Grace was wondering if he would come oftener to the Cedars if Maude were there. She could not be jealous of the girl, and yet the idea had taken possession of her that she was bringing her to the Cedars for Max rather than for herself, and this detracted a little from her pleasure when she began to fit up the room her companion was to occupy. Such a pretty room it was, just over her own, with a bow window looking across the valley where the lake lay sleeping, and on to the hills and the log school-house which, had it been higher, might have been seen above the woods which surrounded it. A room all pink and white, with roses and lilies everywhere, and a bright fire in the grate before which a willow chair was standing and a Maltese kitten sleeping when Maude was ushered into it by Jane, Miss Raynor’s maid.
“Oh, it is so lovely,” Maude thought, as she looked about her, wondering if it were not a dream from which she should presently awake.
But it was no dream, and as the days went on it came to be real to her, and she was conscious of a deep and growing affection for the woman who was always so kind to her and who treated her like an equal rather than a hired companion. Together they read and talked of the books which Maude liked best, and gradually Grace learned of the dream life Maude had led before coming to Richland, and of the people who had deserted her among the hills, but who in this more congenial atmosphere came trooping back, legions of them, and crowding her brain until she had to tell of them, and of the two lives she was living, the ideal and the real. She was sitting on a stool at Grace’s feet, with her face flushed with excitement as she talked of the Kimbricks, and Websters, and Angeline Mason, who were all with her now as they had been at home, and all as real to her as Miss Raynor was herself. Laying her hand upon the girl’s brown curls, Grace said, half laughingly, “And so you are going to write a book. Well, I believe all girls have some such aspiration. I had it once, but it was swallowed up by a stronger, deeper feeling, which absorbed my whole being.”
Here Grace’s voice trembled a little as she leaned back in her chair and seemed to be thinking. Then, rousing herself, she asked suddenly, “How old are you, Maude?”
“Nineteen this month,” was Maude’s reply, and Grace went on: “Just my age when the great sorrow came. That was fourteen years ago next June. I am thirty-three, and Max is thirty-seven.”
She said this last more to herself than to Maude, who started slightly, for this was the first time his name had been mentioned since she came to the Cedars.
After a moment Grace continued: “I have never spoken to you of Mr. Gordon, although I know you have met him. You were with him on the train from Albany to Canandaigua; he told me of you.”