Family Pride; Or, Purified by Suffering. Mary Jane Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ her face crimsoning all over with happy blushes as she saw the dear affixed to her name.

      Katy had waited so anxiously for a letter, or some message which should say that she was not forgotten by Wilford Cameron, but as the weeks went by and it did not come, a shadow had fallen upon her spirits, and the family missed something from her ringing laugh and frolicsome ways, while she herself wondered why the household duties given to her should be so utterly distasteful. She used to enjoy them so much, but now she liked nothing except to go with Uncle Ephraim out into the fields where she could sit alone while he worked nearby, or to ride with Morris as she sometimes did when he made his round of calls. She was not as good as she used to be, she thought, and with a view of making herself better she took to teaching in Morris' and Helen's Sunday-school, greatly to the distress of Aunt Betsy, who groaned bitterly when both her nieces adopted the "Episcopal quirks," forsaking entirely the house where Sunday after Sunday her old-fashioned leghorn with its faded ribbon of green was seen, bending down in the humble worship which God so much approves. But teaching in Sunday-school, taken by itself, could not make Katy better, and the old restlessness remained until the morning when, sitting on the grass beneath the apple tree, she read that Wilford Cameron was coming. Then, as by magic, everything was changed, and Katy never forgot the brightness of that day when the robins sang so merrily above her head and all nature seemed to sympathize with her joy. Afterward there came to her dark, wretched hours, when in her young heart's agony she wished that day had never been, but there was no shadow around her now, nothing but hopeful sunshine, and with a bounding step she sought out Helen, to tell her the good news. Helen's first remark, however, was a chill upon her spirits.

      "Wilford Cameron coming here? What will he think of us, we are so unlike him?"

      This was the first time Katy had seriously considered the difference between her surroundings and those of Wilford Cameron, or how it might affect him. But Aunt Betsy, who had never dreamed of anything like Wilford's home, and who thought her own quite as good as they would average, comforted her, telling her how "if he was any kind of a chap he wouldn't be looking round, and if he did, who cared; she guessed they was as good as he, and as much thought of by the neighbors."

      Wilford's letter had been delayed so that the morrow was the day appointed for his coming, and never sure was there a busier afternoon at the farmhouse than the one which followed the receipt of the letter. Everything that was not spotlessly clean before was made so now. Aunt Betsy in her petticoat and short gown going down upon her knees to scrub the door sill of the back room, as if the city guest were expected to sit in there. On Aunt Hannah and Mrs. Lennox devolved the duty of preparing for the wants of the inner man, while Helen and Katy bent their energies to beautifying their humble home and making the most of their plain furniture.

      "If Uncle Ephraim had only let me move the chimney, we could have had a nice spare sleeping-room instead of this little tucked up hole," Mrs. Lennox said, coming in with her hands covered with flour, and casting a rueful look at the small room kept for company, and where Wilford was to sleep.

      It was not very spacious, being only large enough to admit the high post bed, a single chair, and the old-fashioned washstand with the hole in the top for the bowl and a drawer beneath for towels, the whole presenting a most striking contrast to those handsome chambers on Fifth Avenue, or, indeed, to the one at the Ocean House where Wilford sat smoking and wishing the time away, while Helen and Katy held a consultation as to whether it would not be better to dispense with the parlor altogether and give that room to their visitor. But this was vetoed by Aunt Betsy, who, having finished the back door sill, had now come around to the front, and, with her scrubbing brush in one hand and her saucer of sand in the other, held forth upon the foolishness of the girls.

      "Of course if they had a beau, they'd want a t'other room, else where would they do their sparkin'."

      That settled it. The parlor should remain as it was, Katy said, and Aunt Betsy went on with her scouring, while Helen and Katy consulted together how to make the huge feather bed seem more like the mattresses such as Morris had, and such as Mr. Cameron must be accustomed to. Helen's mind being the most suggestive solved the problem first, and a large comfortable was brought from the box in the garret and folded carefully over the bed, which, thus hardened and flattened, "seemed like a mattress," Katy said, for she tried it, pronouncing it good, and feeling quite well satisfied with the room when it was finished. And certainly it was not wholly uninviting with its snowy bed, whose covering almost swept the floor, its strip of bright carpeting in front, its vase of flowers upon the stand and its white fringed curtain sweeping back from the narrow window.

      "I'd like to sleep here myself. It looks real nice," was Katy's comment, while Helen offered no opinion, but followed her sister into the yard where they were to sweep the grass and prune the early September flowers.

      This afforded Aunt Betsy a chance to reconnoiter and criticise, which last she did unsparingly.

      "What have they done to that bed to make it look so flat? Put on a bed-quilt, as I'm alive! What children! It would break my back to lie there, and this Cannon is none the youngest, accordin' to their tell—nigh on to thirty, if not turned. It will make his bones ache, of course. I am glad I know better than to treat visitors that way. The comforter may stay, but I'll be bound I'll make it softer!" and stealing up the stairs, Aunt Betsy brought down a second feather bed, much lighter than the one already on, but still large enough to suggest the thought of smothering. This she had made herself, intending it as a part of Katy's "setting out," should she ever marry, and as things now seemed tending that way, it was only right, she thought, that Mr. Cannon, as she called him, should begin to have the benefit of it. Accordingly, the handiwork of the girls was destroyed, and two beds, instead of one, were placed beneath the comfortable, which Aunt Betsy permitted to remain.

      "I'm mighty feared they'll find me out," she said, stroking, and patting, and coaxing the beds to lie down, taking great pains in the making, and succeeding so well that when her task was done there was no perceptible difference between Helen's bed and hers, except that the latter was a few inches higher than the former, and more nearly resembled a pincushion in shape.

      Carefully shutting the door, Aunt Betsy hurried away, feeling glad that her nieces were too much engaged in training a vine over a frame to afford them time for discovering what she had done. Katy, she knew, was going to Linwood by and by, after various little things which Mrs. Lennox thought indispensable to the entertaining of so great a man as Wilford Cameron, and which the farmhouse did not possess, and as Helen too would be busy, there was not much danger of detection.

      It was late when the last thing was accomplished, and the sun was quite low ere Katy was free to start on her errand, carrying the market basket in which she was to put the articles borrowed of Morris.

      He was sitting out on his piazza enjoying the fine prospect he had of the sun shining across the pond, on the Silverton hill, and just gilding the top of the little church nestled in the valley. At sight of Katy he arose and greeted her with the kind, brotherly manner now habitual with him, for since we last looked upon Morris Grant he had fought a fierce battle with his selfishness, coming off conqueror, and learning to listen quite calmly while Katy talked to him, as she often did, of Wilford Cameron, never trying to conceal from him how anxious she was for some word of remembrance, and often asking if he thought Mr. Cameron would ever write to her. It was hard at first for Morris to listen, and harder still to hold back the passionate words of love trembling on his lips, to keep himself from telling her how improbable it was that one like Mr. Cameron should cherish thoughts of her after mingling again with the high-born city belles, and to beg of her to take him in Cameron's stead—him who had loved her so long, ever since he first knew what it was to love, and who would cherish her so tenderly, loving her the more because of the childishness which some men might despise. But Morris had kept silence, and, as weeks went by, there came insensibly into his heart a hope, or rather conviction, that Cameron had forgotten the little girl who might in time turn to him, gladdening his home just as she СКАЧАТЬ