“Just that curl on your forehead! Give me that, Grace, and I never will part with it.”
In a moment it was separated from the thick curls that adorned her head, and stooping down, Grace laid a forget-me-not in it, and gave it to Hugh. He—what? kissed it, and kissed Grace, and then put the curls safely in his vest-pocket, and told the child she was the prettiest and best girl he ever knew, and that he should miss her more than all the boys and girls of the village together.
But while the lad was in the very midst of his ardent protestations, a voice from the house called to Grace, and the children parted—to meet again, how and when you shall not be so long learning as they were.
Hugh went to his city home, Grace to her school. He dreaming of Grace Germain as a woman, and wondering if she would not then be his wife—she to resume her studies with no great interest, to wish day after day that Hugh would only come back again, and to wonder if he would be so handsome when he was a man as he was then.
Years passed, Grace was no longer a child but a beautiful girl—a bride; and yet Hugh Willson was not her bridegroom.
A rich young merchant of a neighboring town, captivated by her loveliness and charming manners, had “wooed an won,” and a nine days’ wonder in the village of Romulus, was the wonderful good fortune of the orphan—for of late years Grace had been dependent on her relatives, her parents having died while she was yet very young.
Grace had never seen or heard of the boy of rose-bud memory since their first parting, but her thoughts of him had always been those we have for a pleasant unforgotten dream. And she kept the little gift that Hugh had given her most religiously. The very night before her bridal, though she had wept happy tears over the noble, tender note that Clarence Lovering sent her with a splendid ornament—a wedding-gift—still she had it in her heart even then, to look with no ordinary interest on the little pasteboard box that held the withered flower, and to read, not carelessly, the verses Hugh had written her in a large, boyish hand so long ago.
Yet it was not faithlessness to later vows that prompted her to kiss the rose-bud, and to preserve still longer the blue note and the little box, for Grace with all her heart respected Clarence Lovering, and she loved him well, too. She was a lofty, true-spirited girl, and when she married the young merchant, for better or for worse, as it might prove, she did it with a true and loyal heart; and it was in all respects a union in which might well be asked, and without doubt or fear, the blessing of Heaven.
But there were bitterer tears to be shed, and deeper griefs to be borne than Grace Lovering had yet known; six months after her marriage she followed her young husband to the grave, and there was none on earth that could sustain or uphold her in that day of terrible visitation. Voices and forms with which she was scarcely familiar came to comfort her, but the friend whose companionship would have made any place in the wide world a pleasant home for her, was dead; and the bereaved woman longed to return once again to her early home—the village where all her early life was passed—to bury her husband and lover beside her parents, under the willow-tree in the old burial-ground, and then to mourn in quietness, and alone, away from the scenes of the bustling, noisy town.
And all her desires were speedily complied with—her old guardian and uncle from the little village came to her to assist, and conduct her back to Romulus; and before the year was passed, Grace was again at home in the old house where she was born, and in the grave-yard near by, on which she could daily, hourly look, her husband slept.