CHAPTER XXXI.
MAUDE AND TOM.
It was then that Maude left him and went back to the house, where, standing in the door, she scanned the face and person of the man for whose safety in part she had pledged her heart and hand.
Tom’s tout ensemble was good, and there was about him a certain air of grace and culture which showed itself in every movement. A stranger would have trusted him in a moment, and recognized the true manhood in his expressive face. And Maude recognized it, as she never had before, and the contrast between him and Arthur struck her painfully.
“If Arthur were more like him, I could love him better,” she thought, just as the Judge asked the abrupt question:
“You have a wife, hey?”
“Of course he has,” Maude thought, and still she listened for the answer.
“My wife died some years ago, before the war broke out. She was a Mary Williams, a near relative of the Williamses of Charleston. Perhaps you know them?”
“Know ’em! I’ll bet I do!—the finest family in the State. And you married one of them?” the old Judge said, his manner indicating an increased respect for the man who had married a Williams of Charleston.
Maude knew the family, too, or rather knew of them, and remembered how, some years before, when she was at St. Mary’s, she had heard a Charleston young lady speaking of a Mrs. Carleton from Boston, who had recently died, and whose husband had been so kind and patient and tender, and was “the most perfectly splendid looking man she ever saw.”