THE SPRING FARM.

It was a very pleasant, homelike old farm house, standing among the New England hills, with the summer sunshine falling upon it, and the summer air, sweet with the perfume of roses and June pinks, filling the wide hall and great square rooms, where, on the morning when our story opens, the utmost confusion prevailed. Carpets were up; curtains were down; huge boxes were standing everywhere, while into them two men and a boy were packing the furniture scattered promiscuously around, for on the morrow the family, who had owned and occupied the house so long, were to leave the premises and seek another home in the little village about two miles away. In one of the lower rooms in the wing to the right, where the sunshine was the brightest and the rose-scented air the sweetest, a white-faced woman lay upon a couch looking at and listening to a lady who sat talking to her, withmoney and pride and selfishness stamped upon her as plainly as if the words had been placarded upon her back. The lady was Mrs. Marshall-More, of Boston, whose handsome country house was not far from the red farm house, which, with its rich, well-cultivated acres, had, by the foreclosure of a mortgage she held upon it, recently come into her possession, or rather into that of her half brother, who had bidden it off for her.

Mrs. Marshall-More had once been plain Mrs. John More, but since her husband’s death, she had prefixed her maiden name, with a hyphen to the More, making herself Mrs. Marshall-More, which, she thought, had a very aristocratic look and sound. She was a great lady in her own immediate circle of friends in the city, and a greater lady in Merrivale, where she passed her summers, and her manner toward the little woman on the couch was one of infinite superiority and patronage, mingled with a show of interest and pity. She had driven to the farm house that morning, ostensibly to say good-bye to the family, but really to go over the place which she had coveted so long as a most desirable adjunct to her possessions. What she was saying to the white-faced woman in the widow’s cap was this:

“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Graham, and I hope you do not blame me for foreclosing the mortgage. I had to have the money, for Archie’s college expenses will be very heavy, and then I am going to Europe this summer, and I did not care to draw from my other investments.”

“Oh, no, I blame no one, but it is very hard all the same to leave the old home where I have been sohappy,” Mrs. Graham replied, and Mrs. Marshall-More went on: “I am glad to hear you say so, for the Merrivale people have been very ill-natured about it and I have heard more than once that I hastened the foreclosure and intend to tear down the old house and build a cottage, which is false.”

To this Mrs. Graham made no reply, and Mrs. Marshall-More continued:

“You will be much better off in the village than in this great rambling house, and your children will find employment there. Maude must be eighteen, and ought to be a great help to you. I hear she is a sentimental dreamer, living mostly in the clouds with people only known to herself, and perhaps she needed this change to rouse her to the realities of life.”

“Maude is the dearest girl in the world,” was the mother’s quick protest against what seemed like disapprobation of her daughter.

“Yes, of course,” was Mrs. Marshall-More’s response. “Maude is a nice girl and a pretty girl and will be a great comfort to you when she wakes up to the fact that life is earnest and not all a dream, and in time you will be quite as happy in your new home as you could be here, where it must be very dreary in the winter, when the snow-drifts are piled up to the very window ledges, and the wind screams at you through every crevice.”

“Oh-h,” Mrs. Graham said, with a shudder, her thoughts going back to the day when the blinding snow had come down in great billows upon the newly-made grave in which she left her husband, and went back alone to the desolate home where he would never come again.

It had been so terrible and sudden, his going fromher. Well in the morning, and dead at night; killed by a locomotive and brought to her so mangled that she could never have recognized him as her husband. People had called him over-generous and extravagant, and perhaps he was, but the money he spent so lavishly was always for others, and not for himself, and as the holder of the heavy mortgage on his farm had been content with the interest and never pressed his claim, he had made no effort to lessen it, even after he knew it passed into the hands of Mrs. Marshall-More, who had often expressed a wish to own the place known as the Spring Farm, and so-called from the numerous springs upon it. She would fill it with her city friends and set up quite an English establishment, she said; and now it was hers, to all intents and purposes, for though the deed was in her brother’s name, it was understood that she was mistress of the place and could do what she liked with it. Of the real owner, Max Gordon, her half-brother, little was known, except the fact that he was very wealthy and had for years been engaged to a lady who, by a fall from a horse, had been crippled for life. It was also rumored that the lady had insisted upon releasing her lover from his engagement, but he had refused to be released, and still clung to the hope that she would eventually recover. Just where he was at present, nobody knew. He seldom visited his sister, although she was very proud of him and very fond of talking of her brother Max, who, she said, was so generous and good, although a little queer. He had bidden off the Spring Farm because she asked him to do so, and a few thousand dollars more or less were nothing to him; then, telling her to do what she liked with it, he had gone his way, while poor Lucy Graham’s heart wasbreaking at the thought of leaving the home which her husband had made so beautiful for her. An old-fashioned place, it is true, but one of those old-fashioned places to which our memory clings fondly, and our thoughts go back with an intense longing years after the flowers we have watered are dead, and the shrubs we have planted are trees pointing to the sky. A great square house, with a wing on either side, a wide hall through the center and a fireplace in every room. A well-kept lawn in front, dotted with shade trees and flowering shrubs, and on one side of it a running brook, fed by a spring on the hillside to the west; borders and beds and mounds of flowers;—tulips and roses and pansies and pinks and peonies and lilies and geraniums and verbenas, each blossoming in its turn and making the garden and grounds a picture of beauty all the summer long. No wonder that Lucy Graham loved it and shrank from leaving it, and shrank, too, from Mrs. Marshall-More’s attempts at consolation, saying only when that lady arose to go, “It was kind in you to come and I thank you for it; but just now my heart aches too hard to be comforted. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, I shall call when you get settled in town, and if I can be of any service to you I will gladly do so,” Mrs. Marshall-More said, as she left the room and went out to her carriage, where she stood for a moment looking up and down the road, and saying to herself, “Where can Archie be?”

CHAPTER II.WHERE ARCHIE WAS.

A long lane wound away to the westward across a strip of land called the mowing lot, through a bit of woods and on to a grassy hillside, where, under the shade of a butternut tree, a pair of fat, sleek oxen were standing with a look of content in their large, bright eyes as if well pleased with this unwonted freedom from the plough and the cart. Against the side of one of them a young girl was leaning, with her arm thrown across its neck and her hand caressing the long, white horn of the dumb creature which seemed to enjoy it. The girl was Maude Graham, and she made a very pretty picture as she stood there with her short, brown hair curling in soft rings about her forehead; her dark blue eyes, her bright, glowing face, and a mouth which looked as if made for kisses and sweetness rather than the angry words she was hurling at the young man, or boy, for he was only twenty, who stood before her.

“Archie More,” she was saying, “I don’t think it very nice in you to talk to me in that patronizing kind of way, as if you were so much my superior in everything, and trying to convince me that it is nothing for us to give up the dear old place where every stone and stump means somebody to me, for I know them all and have talked with them all, and called them by name, just as I know all the maiden ferns and water lilies and where the earliest arbutus blossoms in the spring. Oh, Archie, how can I leave Spring Farm and never come backagain! I think I hate you all for taking it from us, and especially your uncle Max.”

Here she broke down entirely, and laying her face on the shining coat of the ox began to cry as if her heart would break, while Archie looked at her in real distress wondering what he should say. He was a city-bred young man, with a handsome, boyish face, and in a way very fond of Maude, whom he had known ever since he was thirteen and she eleven, and he first came to Merrivale to spend the summer. They had played and fished together in the brook, and rowed together on the pond and quarreled and made up, and latterly they had flirted a little, too, although Archie was careful that the flirting should not go too far, for he felt that there was a vast difference between Archie More, son of Mrs. Marshall-More, and Maude Graham, daughter of a country farmer. And still he thought her the sweetest, prettiest girl he had ever seen, ajolly lothe called her, and he writhed under her bitter words, and when she cried he tried to comfort her and explain matters as best he could. But Maude was not to be appeased. She had felt all the time that the place need not have been sold, that it was a hasty thing, and though she did not blame Archie, she was very sore against Mrs. Marshall-More and her brother, and her only answer to all Archie could say, was:

“You needn’t talk. I hate you all, and your uncle Max the most, and if I ever see him I’ll tell him so, and if I don’t you may tell him for me.”

Archie could keep silent and hear his mother blamed and himself, but he roused in defense of his uncle Max.

“Hate my uncle Max,” he exclaimed. “Why, he is the best man that ever lived, and the kindest. Heknew nothing of you, or how you’d feel, when he bought the place; if he had he wouldn’t have done it; and if he could see you now, crying on that ox’s neck, he would give it back to you. That would be just like him.”

“As if I’d take it,” Maude said, scornfully, as she lifted up her head and dashed the tears from her eyes with a rapid movement of both hands. “No, Archie More, I shall never take Spring Farm as a gift from any one, much less from your uncle Max; but I shall buy it of him some day if he keeps it long enough.”

“You?” Archie asked, and Maude replied, “Yes, I, why not? I know I am poor now, but I shall not always be so. People call me crazy, a dreamer, a crank, and all that, because they cannot see what I see; the people who are with me always, my friends; and I know their names and how they look and where they live; Mrs. Kimbrick, with her fifty daughters, all Eliza Anns, and Mrs. Webster, with her fifty daughters, all Ann Elizas, and Angeline Mason, who comes and talks to me in the twilight, wearing a yellow dress; they are real to me as you are, and do you think I am crazy and a crank because of that?”

Archie said he didn’t, but he looked a little suspiciously at the girl standing there so erect, her eyes shining with a strange light as she talked to him of things he could not understand. He had heard of this Mrs. Kimbrick and Mrs. Webster before, with their fifty daughters each, and had thought Maude queer, to say the least. He was sure of it now as she went on:

“Is the earth crazy because there is in it a little acorn which you can’t see, but which is still there, maturing and taking root for the grand old oak, whose branches will one day give shelter to many a tiredhead? Of course not; neither am I, and some time these brain children, or brain seeds, call them what you like, will take shape and grow, and the world will hear of them, and of me; and you and your mother will be proud to say you knew me once, when the people praise the book I am going to write.”

“A book!” and Archie laughed incredulously, it seemed so absurd that little Maude Graham should ever become an author of whom the world would hear.

“Yes,” she answered him decidedly. “A book! Why not? It is in me; it has been there always, and I can no more help writing it than you can help doing,—well, nothing, as you always have. Yes, I shall write a book, and you will read it, Archie More, and thousands more, too; and I shall put Spring Farm in it, and you, and your uncle Max. I think I shall make him the villain.”

She was very hard upon poor Max, whose only offense was that he had bidden off Spring Farm to please his sister, but Archie was ready to defend him again.

“If you knew uncle Max,” he said, “you would make him your hero instead of your villain, for a better man never lived. He is kindness itself and the soul of honor. Why, when he was very young he was engaged to a girl who fell from a horse and broke her leg, or her neck, or her back, I’ve forgotten which. Anyhow, she cannot walk and has to be wheeled in a chair, but Max sticks to her like a burr, because he thinks he ought. I am sure I hope he will never marry her.”

“Why not?” Maude asked, and he replied:

“Because, you see, Max has a heap of money, and ifhe never marries and I outlive him, some of it will come to me. Money is a good thing, I tell you.”

“I didn’t suppose you as mean as that, Archie More! and I hope Mr. Max will marry that broken-backed woman, and that she will live a thousand years! Yes, I do!”

The last three words were emphasized with so vigorous blows on the back of the ox, that he started away suddenly, and Maude would have fallen if Archie had not caught her in his arms.

“Now, Maude,” he said, as he held her for a moment closely to him, “don’t let’s quarrel any more. I’m going away to-morrow to the Adirondacks, then in the fall to college, and may not see you again for a long time; but I sha’n’t forget you. I like you the best of any girl in the world; I do, upon my honor.”

“No, you don’t. I know exactly what you think of me, and always have, but it does not matter now,” Maude answered vehemently. “You are going your way, and I am going mine, and the two ways will never meet.”

And so, quarreling and making up, but making up rather more than they quarreled, the two went slowly along the gravelly lane until they reached the house where Mrs. Marshall-More was standing with a very severe look upon her face, as she said to her son:

“Do you know how long you have kept me waiting?”

Then to Maude:

“Been crying? I am sorry you take it so hard. Believe me, you will be better off in the village. Neither your mother nor you could run the farm, and you will find some employment there. I hear that Mrs. Nipe is wanting an apprentice and that she will give smallwages at first, which is not usual with dressmakers. You’d better apply at once.”

“Thank you,” Maude answered quickly. “I do not think I shall learn dressmaking,” and Maude looked at the lady as proudly as a queen might look upon her subject. “Mrs. More, do you think your brother would promise to keep Spring Farm until I can buy it back?” she continued.

The idea that Maude Graham could ever buy Spring Farm was so preposterous that Mrs. Marshall-More laughed immoderately, as she replied, “Perhaps so. I will ask him; or you can do it yourself. I don’t know where he is now. I seldom do know, but anything addressed to his club, No. —, —— Street, Boston, will reach him in time. And now we must go. Good-bye.”

She offered the tips of her fingers to the girl who just touched them, and then giving her hand to Archie said, “Good-bye, Archie, I am sorry we quarreled so, and I did not mean half I said to you. I hope you will forget it. Good-bye; I may never see you again.”

If Archie had dared he would have kissed the face which had never looked so sweet to him as now; but his mother’s eyes were upon him and so he only said “Good-bye,” and took his seat in the carriage with a feeling that something which had been very dear had dropped out of his life.

CHAPTER III.GOING WEST.

It was a very plain but pretty little cottage of which Mrs. Graham took possession with her children, Maude and John, who was two years younger than his sister. As most of the furniture had been sold it did not take them long to settle, and then the question arose as to how they were to live. A thousand dollars was all they had in the world, and these Mrs. Graham placed in the savings bank against a time of greater need, hoping that, as her friends assured her, something would turn up. “If there was anything I could do, I would do it so willingly,” Maude was constantly saying to herself, while busy with the household duties which now fell to her lot and to which she was unaccustomed. During her father’s life two strong German girls had been employed in the house and Maude had been as tenderly and delicately reared as are the daughters of millionaires. But now everything was changed, and those who had known her only as an idle dreamer and devourer of books, were astonished at the energy and capability which she developed. But these did not understand the girl or know that all the stronger part of her nature had been called into being by the exigencies of the case. Maude’s love for her mother was deep and unselfish, and for her sake she tried to make the most and the best of everything. Stifling with a smile born of a sob all her longings for the past, she turned her thoughts steadily to the one purpose of her life,—buyingSpring Farm back! But how? The book she was going to write did not seem quite so certain now. Her brain children had turned traitors and flown away from the sweeping, dusting, dishwashing and bedmaking which fell to her lot and which she did with a song on her lips lest her mother should detect the heartache which was always with her, even when her face was the brightest and her song the sweetest. She had written to Archie’s uncle without a suspicion that she did not know his real name. As he was a brother of Mrs. More, whose maiden name was Marshall, his must be Marshall too, she reasoned, forgetting to have heard that Mrs. More was only a half-sister and that there had been two fathers. Of course, he was Max Marshall, and she addressed him as follows:

“Merrivale, July —, 18—.

“Mr. Max Marshall:

“Dear Sir,—I am Maude Graham, and you bought my old home, Spring Farm, and it nearly broke my own and mamma’s heart to have it sold. I don’t blame you much now for buying it, but I did once, and I said some hard things about you to Archie More, your nephew, which he may repeat to you. But I was angry then at him and everybody, and I am sorry that I said them. I am only eighteen and very poor, but I shall be rich some day,—I am sure of it,—and able to buy Spring Farm, and I want you to keep it for me and not sell it to any one else. It may be years, but the day will come when I shall have the money of my own. Will you keep the place till then? I think I shall be happier and have more courage to work if you write and say you will.

“Yours truly, “Maude Graham.”

After this letter was sent and before she had reasonto expect an answer, Maude began to look for it, but none came, and the summer stretched on into August and the house at Spring Farm was shut up, for Mrs. Marshall-More was in Europe, and Maude’s great anxiety was to find something to do for her own and her mother’s support. Miss Nipe, the dressmaker, would give her a dollar a week while she was learning the trade, and this, with the three dollars per week which her brother John was earning in a grocery store, would be better than nothing, and she was seriously considering the matter, when a letter from her mother’s brother, who lived “out West,” as that portion of New York between the Cayuga Bridge and Buffalo was then called, changed the whole aspect of her affairs and forged the first link in the chain of her destiny. He could not take his sister and her children into his own large family, he wrote, but he had a plan to propose which, he thought, would prove advantageous to Maude, if her mother approved of it and would spare her from home. About six miles from his place was a school, which his daughter had taught for two years, but as she was about to be married, the position was open to Maude at four dollars a week and her board, provided she would take it.

“Maude is rather young, I know,” Mr. Ailing wrote in conclusion, “but no younger than Annie was when she began to teach, so her age need not stand in the way, if she chooses to come. The country will seem new and strange to her; there are still log-houses in the Bush district; indeed, the school-house is built of logs and the people ride in lumber wagons and are not like Bostonians or New Yorkers, but they are very kind,and Maude will get accustomed to them in time. My advice is that she accept.”

At first Mrs. Graham refused to let her young daughter go so far from home, but Maude was persistent and eager. Log-houses and lumber wagons had no terrors for her. Indeed, they were rather attractions than otherwise, and fired her imagination, which began at once to people those houses of the olden time with the Kimbricks and the Websters, who had forsaken her so long. Four dollars a week seemed a fortune to her, and she would save it all, she said, and send it to her mother, who unwillingly consented at last and fortunately found a gentleman in town who was going to Chicago and would take charge of Maude as far as Canandaigua, where she was to leave the train and finish her journey by stage. But on the evening of the day before the one when Maude was to start, the gentleman received word that his son was very ill in Portland and required his immediate presence.

“I can go alone,” Maude said courageously, though with a little sinking of the heart. “No one will harm me. Crossing the river at Albany is the worst, but I can do as the rest do, and after that I do not leave the car again until we reach Canandaigua.”

“Don’t feel so badly, mamma,” she continued, winding her arms around her mother’s neck and kissing away her tears. “I am not afraid, and don’t you know how often you have said that God cared for the fatherless, and I am that, and I shall ask Him all the time I am in the car to take care of me, and He will answer. He will hear. I’m not a child. I am eighteen in the Bible and a great deal older than that since father died. Don’t cry, darling mamma, and make it harder forme. I must go to-morrow, for school begins next Monday.”

So, for her daughter’s sake, Mrs. Graham tried to be calm, and Maude’s little hair trunk was packed with the garments, in each of which was folded a mother’s prayer for the safety of her child; and the morning came, and the ticket was bought, and the conductor, with whom Mrs. Graham had a slight acquaintance, promised to see to the little girl as far as Albany, where he would put her in charge of the man who took his place. Then the good-byes were said and the train moved on past the village on the hillside, past the dear old Spring Farm which she looked at through blinding tears as long as a tree-top was in sight, past the graveyard where her father was lying, past the meadows and woods and hills she loved so well, and on towards the new country and the new life of which she knew so little.

Those were the days when the Boston train westward-bound moved at a snail’s pace compared with what it does now, and twenty-four hours instead of twelve were required for the trip from Merrivale to Canandaigua, so that the afternoon was drawing to a close when the cars stopped in Greenbush and the passengers alighted and rushed for the boat which was to take them across the river. This, and re-checking hertrunk, was what Maude dreaded the most, and her face was very white and scared and her heart beating violently as she followed the crowd, wondering if she should ever find her trunk among all that pile of baggage they were handling so roughly, and if it would be smashed to pieces when she did, and if she should get into the right car, or be carried somewhere else. She had lost sight of the conductor. Her head was beginning to ache, and there was a lump in her throat every time she thought of her mother and John, who would soon be taking their simple evening meal and talking of her.

“I wonder if I can bear it,” she said to herself, as she sat in the cabin the very image of despair, clasping her hand-bag tightly and looking anxiously at the people around her as if in search of some friendly face, which she could trust.

She had heard so much before leaving home of wolves in sheep’s or rather men’s clothing, who infest railway trains, ready to pounce upon any unsuspecting girl who chanced to fall in their way, and had been so much afraid that some of the wolves might be on her train, lying in wait for her, that she had resolutely kept her head turned to the window all the time with a prayer in her heart that God would let no one speak to and frighten her. And thus far no one had spoken to her, except the conductor, but God must have deserted her now, for just as they were reaching the opposite shore, a gentleman, who had been watching her ever since she crouched down in the shadowy corner, and who had seen her wipe the tears away more than once, came up to her and said, “Are you alone, and can I do anything for you?”

“Yes,—no; oh, I don’t know,” Maude gasped as she clutched her bag, in which was her purse, more tightly, and looked up at the face above her.

It was such a pleasant face, and the voice was so kind and reassuring, that she forgot the wolves and might have given him her bag, purse, check and all, if the conductor had not just then appeared and taken her in charge. Lifting his hat politely the stranger walked away, while Maude went to identify her trunk.

“Will you take a sleeper?” the conductor asked.

And she replied: “Oh, no. I can’t afford that.”

So he found her a whole seat in the common car, and telling her he would speak of her to the new conductor, bade her good-bye, and she was left alone.

Very nervously she watched her fellow passengers as they came hurrying in,—men, mostly, it seemed to her,—rough-looking men, too, for there had been a horserace that day at a point on the Harlem road, and they were returning from it. Occasionally some one of them stopped and looked at the girl in black, who sat so straight and still, with her hand-bag held down upon the vacant seat beside her as if to keep it intact. But no one offered to take it, and Maude breathed more freely as the crowded train moved slowly from the depot. After a little the new conductor came and spoke to her and looked at her ticket and went out, and then she was really alone. New England, with its rocks and hills and mountains, was behind her. Mother, and John, and home were far away, and the lump in her throat grew larger, and there crept over her such a sense of dreariness and homesickness, that she would have cried outright if she dared to. There were only six women in the car besides herself. All the rest werewolves; she felt sure of that, they talked and laughed so loud, and spit so much tobacco-juice. They were so different from the stranger on the boat, she thought, wondering who he was and where he had gone. How pleasantly he had spoken to her, and how she wished——She got no further, for a voice said to her:

“Can I sit by you? Every other seat is taken.”

“Yes, oh, yes. I am so glad,” Maude exclaimed involuntarily in her delight at recognizing the stranger, and springing to her feet she offered him the seat next to the window.

“Oh, no,” he said, with a smile which would have won the confidence of any girl. “Keep that yourself. You will be more comfortable there. Are you going to ride all night?”

“Yes, I am going to Canandaigua,” she replied.

“To Canandaigua!” he repeated, looking at her a little curiously; but he asked no more questions then, and busied himself with adjusting his bag and his large traveling shawl, which last he put on the back of the seat,, more behind Maude than himself.

Then he took out a magazine, while Maude watched him furtively, thinking him the finest looking man she had ever seen, except her father, of whom, in his manner, he reminded her a little. Not nearly so old, certainly, as her father, and not young like Archie either, for there were a few threads of grey in his mustache and in his brown hair which had a trick of curling slightly at the ends under his soft felt hat. Who was he? she wondered. The initials on his satchel were “M. G.,” but that told her nothing. How she hoped he was going as far as she was, she felt so safe with him,and at last, as the darkness increased and he shut up his book, she ventured to ask:

“Are you going far?”

“Yes,” he replied, with a twinkle of humor in his blue eyes, “and if none of these men get out, I am afraid I shall have to claim your forbearance all night, but I will make myself as small as possible. Look,” and with a laugh he drew himself close to the arm of the seat, leaving quite a space between them; but he did not tell her that he had engaged a berth in the sleeper, which he had abandoned when he found her there alone, with that set of roughs, whose character he knew.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these ye have done it unto me,” would surely be said to him some day, for he was always giving the cup of water, even to those who did not know they were thirsting until after they had drunk of what he offered them. Once he brought Maude some water in a little glass tumbler, which he took from his satchel, and once he offered her an apple which she declined lest she should seem too forward; then, as the hours crept on and her eyelids began to droop, he folded his shawl carefully and made her let him put it behind her head, suggesting that she remove her hat, as she would rest more comfortably without it.

“Now sleep quietly,” he said, and as if there were something mesmeric in his voice, Maude went to sleep at once and dreamed she was at home with her mother beside her, occasionally fixing the pillow under her head and covering her with something which added to her comfort.

It was the stranger’s light overcoat which, as the Septembernight grew cold and chill, he put over the girl, whose upturned face he had studied as intently as she had studied his. About seven o’clock the conductor came in, lantern in hand, and as its rays fell upon the stranger, he said, “Hello, Gordon, you here? I thought you were in the sleeper. On guard, I see, as usual. Who is the lamb this time?”

“I don’t know; do you?” the man called Gordon replied.

“No,” the conductor said, turning his light full upon Maude; then, “Why, it’s a little girl the Boston conductor put in my care; but she’s safer with you. Comes from the mountains somewhere, I believe. Guess she is going to seek her fortune. She ought to find it, with that face. Isn’t she pretty?” and he glanced admiringly at the sweet young face now turned to one side, with one hand under the flushed cheek and the short rings of damp hair curling round her forehead.

“Yes, very,” Gordon replied, moving uneasily and finally holding a newspaper between Maude and the conductor’s lantern, for it did not seem right to him that any eyes except those of a near friend should take this advantage of a sleeping girl.

The conductor passed on, and then Gordon fell asleep until they reached a way station, where the sudden stopping of a train roused him to consciousness, and a moment after he was confronted by a young man, who, at sight of him, stopped short and exclaimed:

“Max Gordon, as I live! I’ve hunted creation over for you and given you up. Where have you been and why weren’t you at Long Branch, as you said you’d be when you wrote me to join you there?”

“Got tired of it, you were so long coming, so I went to the Adirondacks with Archie.”

“Did you bring me any letters?” Max replied, and his friend continued, “Yes, a cart load. Six, any way,” and he began to take them from his side pocket. “One, two, three, four, five; there’s another somewhere. Oh, here ’tis,” he said, taking out the sixth, which looked rather soiled and worn. “I suppose it’s for you,” he continued, “although it’s directed to Mr. Max Marshall, Esq., and is in a school-girl’s handwriting. It came long ago, and we chaps puzzled over it a good while; then, as no one appeared to claim it, and it was mailed at Merrivale, where your sister spends her summers, I ventured to bring it with the rest. If you were not such a saint I’d say you had been imposing a false name upon some innocent country girl, and, by George, I believe she’s here now with your ulster over her! Running off with her, eh? What will Miss Raynor say?” he went on, as his eyes fell upon Maude, who just then stirred in her sleep and murmured softly, “Our Father, who art in Heaven.”

She was at home in her little white-curtained bedroom, kneeling with her mother and saying her nightly prayer, and, involuntarily, both the young men bowed their heads as if receiving a benediction.

“I think, Dick, that your vile insinuation is answered,” Max said, and Dick rejoined, “Yes, I beg your pardon. Under your protection, I s’pose. Well, she’s safe; but I must be finding that berth of mine. Will see you in the morning. Good-night.”

He left the car, while Max Gordon tried to read his letters as best he could by the dim light near him. One was from his sister, one from Archie, three onbusiness, while the last puzzled him a little, and he held it awhile as if uncertain as to his right to open it.

“It must be for me,” he said at last, and breaking the seal he read Maude’s letter to him, unconscious that Maude was sleeping there beside him.

Indeed, he had never heard of Maude Graham before, and had scarcely given a thought to the former owners of Spring Farm. His sister had a mortgage upon it; the man was dead; the place must be sold, and Mrs. More asked him to buy it; that was all he knew when he bid it off.

“Poor little girl,” he said to himself. “If I had known about you, I don’t believe I’d have bought the place. There was no necessity to foreclose, I am sure; but it was just like Angie; and what must this Maude think of me not to have answered her letter. I am so sorry;” and his sorrow manifested itself in an increased attention to the girl, over whom he adjusted his ulster more carefully, for the air in the car was growing very damp and chilly.

It was broad daylight when Maude awoke, starting up with a smile on her face and reminding Max of some lovely child when first aroused from sleep.

“Why, I have slept all night,” she exclaimed, as she tossed back her wavy hair; “and you have given me your shawl and ulster, too,” she added, with a blush which made her face, as Max thought, the prettiest he had ever seen.

Who was she, he wondered, and once he thought to ask her the question direct; then he tried by a littlefinessingto find out who she was and where she came from, but Maude’s mother had so strongly impressed it upon her not to be at all communicative to strangers,that she was wholly non-committal even while suspecting his design, and when at last Canandaigua was reached he knew no more of her history than when he first saw her, white and trembling on the boat. She was going to take the Genesee stage, she said, and expected her uncle to meet her at Oak Corners in Richland.

“Why, that is funny,” he said. “If it were not that a carriage is to meet me, I should still be your fellow-traveler, for my route lies that way.”

And then he did ask her uncle’s name. She surely might tell him so much, Maude thought, and replied:

“Captain James Alling, my mother’s brother.”

Her name was not Alling, then, and reflecting that now he knew who her uncle was he could probably trace her, Max saw her into the stage, and taking her ungloved hand in his held it perhaps a trifle longer than he would have done if it had not been so very soft and white and pretty, and rested so confidingly in his, while she thanked him for his kindness. Then the stage drove away, while he stood watching it, and wondering why the morning was not quite so bright as it had been an hour ago, and why he had not asked her point-blank who she was, or had been so stupid as not to give her his card.

“Max Gordon, you certainly are getting into your dotage,” he said to himself. “A man of your age to be so interested in a little unknown girl! What would Grace say? Poor Grace. I wonder if I shall find her improved, and why she has buried herself in this part of the country.”

As he entered the hotel a thought of Maude Graham’sletter came to his mind, and calling for pen and paper he dashed off the following:

Canandaigua, September —, 18—.

Miss Maude Graham,—Your letter did not reach me until last night, when it was brought me by a friend. I have not been in Boston since the first of last July, and the reason it was not forwarded to me is that you addressed it wrong, and they were in doubt as to its owner. My name is Gordon, not Marshall, as you supposed, and I am very sorry for your sake and your mother’s that I ever bought Spring Farm. Had I known what I do now I should not have done so. But it is too late, and I can only promise to keep it as you wish until you can buy it back. You are a brave little girl and I will sell it to you cheap. I should very much like to know you, and when I am again in Merrivale I shall call upon you and your mother, if she will let me.

With kind regards to her I amYours truly,“Max Gordon.”

With kind regards to her I am

Yours truly,

“Max Gordon.”

The letter finished, he folded and directed it to Miss Maude Graham, Merrivale, Mass., while she for whom it was intended was huddled up in one corner of the crowded stage and going on as fast as four fleet horses could take her towards Oak Corners and the friends awaiting her there. Thus strangely do two lives sometimes meet and cross each other and then drift widely apart; but not forever, in this instance, let us hope.

CHAPTER V.MISS RAYNOR.

About a mile from Laurel Hill, a little village in Richland, was an eminence, or plateau, from the top of which one could see for miles the rich, well-cultivated farms in which the town abounded, the wooded hills and the deep gorges all slanting down to a common centre, the pretty little lake, lying as in the bottom of a basin, with its clear waters sparkling in the sunshine. And here, just on the top of the plateau, where the view was the finest, an eccentric old bachelor, Paul Raynor, had a few years before our story opens, built himself a home after his own peculiar ideas of architecture, but which, when finished and furnished, was a most delightful place, especially in the summer when the flowers and shrubs, of which there was a great profusion, were in blossom, and the wide lawn in front of the house was like a piece of velvet. Here for two years Paul Raynor had lived quiteen prince, and then, sickening with what he knew to be a fatal disease, he had sent for his invalid sister Grace, who came and stayed with him to the last, finding after he was dead that all his property had been left to her, with a request that she would make the Cedars, as the place was called, her home for a portion of the time at least. And so, though city bred and city born, Grace had stayed on for nearly a year, leading a lonely life, for she knew but few of her neighbors, while her crippled condition prevented her from mingling at all in the society she was so well fitted to adorn. Asthe reader will have guessed, Grace Raynor was the girl, or rather woman, for she was over thirty now, to whom Max Gordon had devoted the years of his early manhood, in the vain hope that some time she would be cured and become his wife. A few days before the one appointed for her bridal she had been thrown from her horse and had injured her spine so badly that for months she suffered such agony that her beautiful hair turned white; then the pain ceased suddenly, but left her no power to move her lower limbs, and she had never walked since and never would. But through all the long years Max had clung to her with a devotion born first of his intense love for her and later of his sense of honor which would make him loyal to her even to the grave. Knowing how domestic he was in his tastes and how happy he would be with wife and children, Grace had insisted that he should leave her and seek some other love. But his answer was always the same. “No, Grace, I am bound to you just as strongly as if the clergyman had made us one, and will marry you any day you will say the word. Your lameness is nothing so long as your soul is left untouched, and your face, too,” he would sometimes add, kissing fondly the lovely face which, with each year, seemed to grow lovelier, and from which the snowy hair did not in the least detract.

But Grace knew better than to inflict herself upon him, and held fast to her resolve, even while her whole being went out to him with an intense longing for his constant love and companionship. Especially was this the case at the Cedars, where she found herself very lonely, notwithstanding the beauty of the place and its situation.

“If he asks me again, shall I refuse?” she said to herself on the September morning when Maude Graham was alighting from the dusty stage at Oak Corners, two miles away, and the carriage sent for Max was only an hour behind.

How pretty she was in the dainty white dress, with a shawl of scarlet wool wrapped around her, as she sat in her wheel chair on the broad piazza, which commanded a view of the lake and the green hills beyond. Not fresh and bright and glowing as Maude, who was like an opening rose with the early dew upon it, but more like a pale water lily just beginning to droop, though very sweet and lovely still. There was a faint tinge of color in her cheek as she leaned her head against the cushions of her chair and wondered if she should find Max the same ardent lover as ever, ready to take her to his arms at any cost, or had he, during the past year, seen some other face fairer and younger than her own.

“I shall know in a moment if he is changed ever so little,” she thought, and although she did not mean to be selfish, and would at any moment have given him up and made no sign, there was a throb of pain in her heart as she tried to think what life would be without Max to love her. “I should die,” she whispered, “and please God, I shall die before many years and leave my boy free.”

He was her boy still, just as young and handsome as he had been thirteen years ago, when he lifted her so tenderly from the ground and she felt his tears upon her forehead as she writhed in her fearful pain. And now when at last he came and put his arms around her and took her face between his hands and looked fondly into it as he questioned her of her health, she felt thathe was unchanged, and thanked her Father for it. He was delighted with everything, and sat by her until after lunch, which was served on the piazza, and asked her of her life there and the people in the neighborhood, and finally if she knew of a Capt. Alling.

“Capt. Alling,” she replied; “why, yes. He lives on a farm about two miles from here and we buy our honey from him. A very respectable man, I think, although I have no acquaintance with the family. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing; only there was a girl on the train with me who told me she was his niece,” Max answered indifferently, with a vigorous puff at his cigar, which Grace always insisted he should smoke in her presence. “She was very pretty and very young. I should like to see her again,” he added, more to himself than to Grace, who, without knowing why, felt suddenly as if a cloud had crept across her sky.

Jealousy had no part in Grace’s nature, nor was she jealous of this young, pretty girl whom Max would like to see again, and to prove that she was not she asked many questions about her and said she would try and find out who she was, and that she presumed she had come to attend the wadding of Capt. Alling’s daughter, who was soon to be married. This seemed very probable, and no more was said of Maude until the afternoon of the day following, which was Sunday. Then, after Max returned from church and they were seated at dinner he said abruptly, “I saw her again.”

“Saw whom?” Grace asked, and he replied, “My little girl of the train. She was at church with her uncle’s family. A rather ordinary lot I thought them,but she looked as sweet as a June pink. You know they are my favorite flowers.”

“Yes,” Grace answered slowly, while again a breath of cold air seemed to blow over her and make her draw her shawl more closely around her.

But Max did not suspect it, and pared a peach for her and helped her to grapes, and after dinner wheeled her for an hour on the broad plateau, stooping over her once and caressing her white hair, which he told her was very becoming, and saying no more of the girl seen in church that morning. The Allings had been late and the rector was reading the first lesson when they came in, father and mother and two healthy, buxom girls, followed by Maude, who, in her black dress looked taller and slimmer than he had thought her in the car, and prettier, too, with the brilliant color on her cheeks and the sparkle in the eyes which met his with such glad surprise in them that he felt something stir in his heart different from anything he had felt since he and Grace were young. The Allings occupied a pew in front of him and on the side, so that he could look at and study Maude’s face, which he did far more than he listened to the sermon. And she knew he was looking at her, too, and always blushed when she met his earnest gaze. As they were leaving the church he managed to get near her, and said, “I hope you are quite well after your long journey, Miss——.”

“Graham,” she answered, involuntarily, but so low that he only caught the first syllable and thought that she saidGrey.

She was Miss Grey, then, and with this bit of information he was obliged to be content. Twice during the week he rode past the Alling house, hoping to see theeyes which had flashed so brightly upon him on the porch of the church, and never dreaming of the hot tears of homesickness they were weeping in the log school-house of the Bush district, where poor Maude was so desolate and lonely. If he had, he might, perhaps, have gone there and tried to comfort her, so greatly was he interested in her, and so much was she in his mind.

He stayed at the Cedars several days, and then finding it a little tiresome said good-bye to Grace and went his way again, leaving her with a vague consciousness that something had come between them; a shadow no larger than a man’s hand, it is true, but still a shadow, and as she watched him going down the walk she whispered sadly, “Max is slipping from me.”

The setting sun of a raw January afternoon was shining into the dingy school-room where Maude sat by the iron-rusted box stove, with her feet on the hearth, reading a note which had been brought to her just before the close of school by a man who had been to the postoffice in the village at the foot of the lake. It was nearly four months since she first crossed the threshold of the log school-house, taking in at a glance the whole dreariness of her surroundings, and feeling for the moment that she could not endure it. But she was somewhat accustomed to it now, and not half so much afraidof the tall girls and boys, her scholars, as she had been at first, while the latter were wholly devoted to her and not a little proud of their “young school ma’am,” as they called her. Everybody was kind to her, and she had not found “boarding round” so very dreadful after all, for the fatted calf was always killed for her, and the best dishes brought out, while it was seldom that she was called upon to share her sleeping-room with more than one member of the family. And still there was ever present with her a longing for her mother and for Johnnie and a life more congenial to her tastes. Dreaming was out of the question now, and the book which was to make her famous and buy back the old home seemed very far in the future. Just how large a portion of her thoughts was given to Max Gordon it was difficult to say. She had felt a thrill of joy when she saw him in church, and a little proud, too, it may be, of his notice of her. Very minutely her cousins had questioned her with regard to her acquaintance with him, deploring her stupidity in not having ascertained who he was. A relative, most likely, of Miss Raynor, in whose pew he sat, they concluded, and they told their cousin of the lady at the Cedars, Grace Raynor, who could not walk a step, but was wheeled in a chair, sometimes by a maid and sometimes by a man. The ladypar excellenceof the neighborhood she seemed to be, and Maude found herself greatly interested in her and in everything pertaining to her. Twice she had been through the grounds, which were open to the public, and had seen Grace both times in the distance, once sitting in her chair upon the piazza, and once being wheeled in the woods by her man-servant, Tom. But beyond this she had not advanced, and nothing could befarther from her thoughts than the idea that she would ever be anything to the lady of the Cedars. Max Gordon’s letter had been forwarded to her from Merrivale, but had created no suspicion in her mind that he and her friend of the train were one. She had thought it a little strange that he should have been in Canandaigua the very day that she arrived there, and wished she might have seen him, but the truth never dawned upon her until some time in December, when her mother wrote to her that he had called to see them, expressing much regret at Maude’s absence, and when told where she was and when she went, exclaiming with energy, as he sprang to his feet, “Why, madam, your daughter was with me in the train,—a little blue-eyed, brown-haired girl in black, who said she was Captain Alling’s niece.”

“He seemed greatly excited,” Mrs. Graham wrote, “and regretted that he did not know who you were. He got an idea somehow that your name wasGrey, and said he received your letter with you asleep beside him. He is a splendid looking man, with the pleasantest eyes and the kindest voice I ever heard or saw.”

“Ye-es,” Maude said slowly, as she recalled the voice which had spoken so kindly to her, and the eyes which had looked so pleasantly into her own. “And that was Max Gordon! He was going to the Cedars, and Miss Raynor is the girl for whom he has lived single all these years. Oh-h!”

She was conscious of a vague regret that her stranger friend was the betrothed husband of Grace Raynor, who, at that very time, was thinking of her and fighting down a feeling as near to jealousy as it was possible for her to harbor. In the same mail with Maude’s letterfrom her mother there had come to the Cedars one from Max, who said that he had discovered who was hiscompagnon da voyage.

“She is teaching somewhere in your town,” he wrote “and I judge is not very happy there. Can’t you do something for her, Grace? It has occurred to me that to have a girl like her about you would do you a great deal of good. We are both getting on in years, and need something young to keep us from growing old, and you might make her your companion. She is very pretty, with a soft, cultivated voice, and must be a good reader. Think of it, and if you decide to do it, inquire for her at Captain Alling’s. Her name is Maude Graham.

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