It was very bad taste in Max to select the 20th of June for his wedding day, and she should suppose he would remember twenty years ago, when Grace Raynor was to have been his bride, Mrs. Marshall-More said to Archie, when commenting upon her brother’s approaching marriage, which did not altogether please her. She would far rather that he should remain single, for Archie’s sake and her own. And still it was some comfort that she was to have for her sister one so famous as Maude was getting to be. So she went up to Merrivale early in June and opened her own house, and patronized Maude and Mrs. Graham, and made many suggestions with regard to the wedding, which she would have had very fine and elaborate had they allowed it. But Maude’s preference was for a quiet affair, with only a few of her more intimate friends present. And she had her way. Archie was there, of course, and made himself master of ceremonies. He had received the news of Maude’s engagement with a keener pang of regret than he had thought it possible for him to feel, and suddenly woke up to a consciousness that he had always had a greater liking for Maude than he supposed. But it was too late now, and casting his regrets to the winds he made the best of it, and was apparently the gayest of all the guests who, on the morning of the 20th of June, assembled in Mrs. Graham’s parlor, where Max and Maude were made one.
Aunt Maude, Archie called her, as he kissed her and asked if she remembered the time she cried on the neck of the brown ox, and declared her hatred of Max and all his relations.
“But I did not know him then; did I, Max?” Maude said; and the bright face she lifted to her husband told that she was far from hating him now.
There was a short trip to the West and a flying visit to Richland and the Cedars, so fraught with memories of the past and of Grace, whose grave on the wedding day had been one mass of flowers which Max had ordered put there. “Her wedding garment,” he said to Maude, to whom he told what he had done. “She seems very near to me now, and I am sure she is glad.”
It was a lovely July day, when Max and Maude returned from their bridal journey and took possession of the old home at Spring Farm, where Mrs. Graham met them with a very different expression upon her face from what it wore when we first saw her there years ago. The place was hers again, to enjoy as long as she lived; and if it had been beautiful when she left it, she found it far more so now, for Mrs. Marshall-More’s improvements, for which Max’s money had paid, were mostly in good taste, and never had the grounds looked better than when Max and Maude drove into them on this July afternoon. Although a little past their prime, there were roses everywhere, and the grassy walks, which Mrs. More had substituted in place of gravel, were freshly cut, and smooth and soft as velvet, while the old-fashioned flowers Maude loved so well, were filling the air with their perfume, and the birds in the maple tree seemed carolling a welcome to the bride so full were they of song.
And here we shall leave her, happy in her old home and in her husband’s love, which is more to her than all the world beside. Whether she will ever write another book we do not know, probably she will, for where the brain seeds have taken root it is hard to dislodge them, and Maude often hears around her the voices of new ideal friends, to whom she may some time be compelled to give shape and name, as she did to the friends of her childhood.
THE HEPBURN LINE.
CHAPTER I.—Doris’s Story.
MY AUNTS.
I had come from my mother’s burial to the rector’s house, where I was to stay until it should be known what disposition would be made of me by my father’s aunts, the Misses Morton, who lived at Morton Park, near Versailles, Kentucky. Of these aunts I knew little, except that there were three of them now, but there had been four, and my great-grandfather, an eccentric old man, had called them respectively, Keziah, Desire, Maria and Beriah which odd names he had shortened into Kizzy and Dizzy, Rier and Brier. My father, who had lived with them when a boy, had often talked of Morton Park, and once when he was telling me of the grand old house, with its wide piazza and Corinthian pillars, its handsome grounds and the troop of blacks ready to come at his call, I had asked him why he didn’t go back there, saying I should like it better than our small cottage, where there were no grounds and no Corinthian pillars and no blacks to wait upon us. For a moment he did not answer, but glanced at my mother with a look of unutterable tenderness, then, drawing us both closely to him, he said, “If I go there I must leave you behind; and I would rather have mamma and you than all the blacks and Corinthian pillars in the world.”