CHAPTER IX.
GOOD-BYE, MAX; GOOD-BYE.
It was a cold, stormy afternoon in March. The thermometer marked six below zero, and the snow which had fallen the day before was tossed by the wind in great white clouds, which sifted through every crevice of the house at the Cedars, and beat against the window from which Maude Graham was looking anxiously out into the storm for the carriage which had been sent to meet the train in which Max Gordon was expected. He had not kept his promise to be with Grace at Christmas. An important lawsuit had detained him, and as it would be necessary for him to go to London immediately after its close, he could not tell just when he would be at the Cedars again.
All through the autumn Grace had been failing, while a cold, taken in November, had left her with a cough, which clung to her persistently. Still she kept up, looking forward to the holidays, when Max would be with her. But when she found he was not coming she lost all courage, and Maude was alarmed to see how rapidly she failed. Nearly all the day she lay upon the couch in her bedroom, while Maude read or sang to her or talked with her of the book which had actually been commenced, and in which Grace was almost as much interested as Maude herself. Grace was a careful and discriminating critic, and if Maude were ever a success she would owe much of it to the kind friend whose sympathy and advice were so invaluable. A portion of every day she wrote, and every evening read what she had written, to Grace, who smiled as she recognized Max Gordon in the hero and knew that Maude was weaving the tale mostly from her own experience. Even the Bush district and its people furnished material for the plot, and more than one boy and girl who had called Maude schoolma’am figured in its pages, while Grace was everywhere, permeating the whole with her sweetness and purity.
“I shall dedicate it to you,” Maude said to her one day, and Grace replied:
“That will be kind; but I shall not be here to see it, for before your book is published I shall be lying under the flowers in Mt. Auburn. I want you to take me there, if Max is not here to do it.”
“Oh, Miss Raynor,” Maude cried, dropping her MS. and sinking upon her knees beside the couch where Grace was lying, “you must not talk that way. You are not going to die. I can’t lose you, the dearest friend I ever had. What should I do without you, and what would Max Gordon do?”
At the mention of Max’s name a faint smile played around Grace’s white lips, and lifting her thin hand she laid it caressingly upon the girl’s brown hair as she said:
“Max will be sorry for awhile, but after a time there will be a change, and I shall be only a memory. Tell him I was willing, and that although it was hard at first it was easy at the last.”
What did she mean? Maude asked herself, while her thoughts went back to that summer afternoon in the log school-house on the hill, when Max Gordon’s eyes and voice had in them a tone and look born of more than mere friendship. Did Grace know? Had she guessed the truth? Maude wondered, as, conscience-stricken, she laid her burning cheek against the pale one upon the pillow. There was silence a moment, and when Grace spoke again she said:
“It is nearly time for Max to be starting for Europe, or I should send for him to come, I wish so much to see him once more before I die.”