“He did!” Maude exclaimed, with a ring in her voice which made Grace’s heart beat a little faster, but she went calmly on:
“Yes; he was greatly interested in you, although he did not then know who you were; but he knows now. He is coming here soon. We have been engaged ever since I was seventeen and he was twenty-one; fourteen years ago the 20th of June we were to have been married. Everything was ready; my bridal dress and veil had been brought home, and I tried them on one morning to see how I looked in them. I was beautiful, Max said, and I think he told the truth; for a woman may certainly know whether the face she sees in the mirror be pretty or not, and the picture I saw was very fair, while he, who stood beside me, was splendid in his young manhood. How I loved him; more, I fear, than I loved God, and for that I was punished,—oh, so dreadfully punished. We rode together that afternoon, Max and I, and I was wondering if there were ever a girl as happy as myself, and pitying the women I met because they had no Max beside them, when suddenly my horse reared, frightened by a dog, and I was thrown upon a sharp curb-stone. Of the months of agony which followed I cannot tell you, except that I prayed to die and so be rid of pain. The injury was in my spine, and I have never walked in all the fourteen years since. Max has been true to me, and would have married me had I allowed it. But I cannot burden him with a cripple, and sometimes I wish, or think I do, that he would find some one younger, fairer than I am, on whom to lavish his love. He would make a wife so happy. And yet it would be hard for me, I love him so much. Oh, Max; I don’t believe he knows how dear he is to me.”
She was crying softly now, and Maude was crying, too; and as she smoothed the snow-white hair and kissed the brow on which lines were beginning to show, she said:
“He will never find a sweeter face than yours.”
To her Max Gordon now was only the betrothed husband of her mistress, and still she found herself looking forward to his visit with a keen interest, wondering what he would say to her, and if his eyes would kindle at sight of her as they had done when she saw him in the church at Laurel Hill. He was to come on the 20th, the anniversary of the day which was to have been his bridal day, and when the morning came, Grace said to Maude:
“I’d like to wear my wedding gown; do you think it would be too much like Dickens’ Miss Havershaw?”
“Yes, yes,” Maude answered, quickly, feeling that faded satin and lace of fourteen years’ standing would be sadly out of place. “You are lovely in those light gowns you wear so much,” she said.
So Grace wore the dress which Maude selected for her; a soft, woolen fabric of a creamy tint, with a blue shawl, the color of her eyes, thrown around her, and a bunch of June pinks, Max’s favorite flowers, at her belt, Then, when she was ready, Maude wheeled her out to the piazza, where they waited for their visitor.
CHAPTER VIII.
MAX AT THE CEDARS.
The train was late that morning and lunch was nearly ready before they saw the open carriage turn into the grounds, with Max standing up in it and waving his hat to them.