The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

“He will get over it easily,” she thought, and she was rather formal and stiff when she bade him good-bye and took the car which was to carry her to the close seclusion she contemplated, where none of her dear friends could witness her humiliation, or inquire for her daughter.

For a few moments Craig stood watching the train, and when it finally disappeared in the darkness he was conscious of being glad that Mrs. Tracy was gone. The burden was beginning to lighten, although there was still a feeling as if he were stunned and that what had made his future seem bright had been swept from under him.

“Nobody shall know it, if Jeff keeps his counsel, and I think he will,” he said to himself, as he went back to the hotel.

Contrary to his usual custom, he staid for a time in the office where Jeff was still head clerk, doing his duty well for a boy, and skillfully parrying remarks and questions put to him concerning the elopement, as it was called. For a time Craig sat pretending to read a paper, but not losing a word of what was said. He had no intimates in town. The young men thought him proud and cold and had made no advances, with but one exception. A young M. D. had been called by Mrs. Mason to see him when he first came, and had prescribed for him occasionally since. He had also driven with him once after Dido, and now, proud of his acquaintance and anxious to show his intimacy, he said to Craig: “By the way, Mason, how is it? I thought one time you were going to carry off the heiress?”

“You see you were mistaken,” Craig answered quietly, without looking up from his paper, while Jeff chimed in: “Pho! I guess you wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen all I did. Nobody had the ghost of a chance but Mr. Hilton.”

Craig blessed the boy in his heart for having helped him over a rough place, and after sitting a few minutes longer, bade a courteous good night to the men in the office and went to his room.

“Proud as Lucifer and stiff as a ram-rod. I don’t blame any girl for preferring Hilton to him,” some one remarked, and there the conversation dropped so far as Craig was concerned, but the gossip did not at once subside in town.

There was a half column account of the marriage in the Ridgefield Weekly on Wednesday, and another in the Boston Herald. The bride’s beauty and wealth and position were dwelt upon at length, and Mark was pronounced on the whole a good fellow, eligible for any one except for his lack of fortune. Craig read every word and found himself wondering if it was the girl he had hoped to marry whose name was being bandied about. He staid in Ridgefield two weeks and drove Dido nearly every day over the same roads he had been with Helen, and up and down the hill where he had asked her to be his wife, and where Dido usually tried to run from some imaginary baby cart. Sometimes Jeff was with him; sometimes Uncle Zach, but oftener he went alone, thinking over the past, and finding at last that he could think of it without a pang such as had hurt him at first. He had loved Helen Tracy and believed that she loved him, and was a true, womanly woman. He had found his mistake. She did not love him. She was false in every particular; her whole life was a lie, and he would blot her from his heart.

In this state of mind he went home to his mother some time in October, and the season for city boarders at the Prospect House was over. The best china and linen were packed away. The silver forks and spoons were wrapped in the old shawl and hidden on the top shelf in Mrs. Taylor’s closet. The rooms in the west wing were scrubbed and aired and fumigated, and then shut up for the winter, and life at the Prospect House went on as usual, except in the office, where Jeff still was clerk, and where Uncle Zach missed Mark more and more every day.

“I wonder that he don’t write. I’m owin’ him some wages and I want to hear from the boy,” he said.