"Come, come, darling! Why, the rain has drenched you," I replied, putting my arm about her and leading her to the house.
The storm had set in furiously. There was no leaving the house that night. I resolved that Marian should sleep with me; so I went to Mr. Gaston and told him I regretted our limited accommodations obliged me to offer him a temporary bed in the parlor.
When I told Marian of this arrangement, she seemed relieved. "I am glad to spend the night here and with you, Mary," she said. "All is so quiet and peaceful."
Quiet and peaceful! The greater storm in her own breast made her forget the contending elements without.
My aversion to Mr. Gaston was, I believe, heartily reciprocated, and he must have chafed at my influence over Marian. He took her away from her home, never to return, on the very next day. They sailed for Cuba shortly afterward.
The crisis Marian had feared for her aunt soon came, and she went, with the remnant of her fortune, to live in some western town.
Seven years had rolled by since all this, and Marian was fast passing into the shadows we like to call up when the world is hushed around us and, we are thinking—thinking.
I was married, and laughing children were crowding out these earlier remembrances.
An affection of the throat, from which my husband was suffering, rendered the best medical advice necessary. I accompanied him to New York, where I found—let me pause in telling it, to do reverence to the unseen hand that led me there—Marian.
In this lonely stranger how little do I behold of my childhood's earliest pride!