CHAPTER II. MADELINE CLYDE. Madge her schoolmates called her, because the name suited her, they said; but Maddy they called her at home, and there was a world of unutterable tenderness in the voices of the old couple, her grandparents, when they said that name, while their dim eyes lighted up with pride and joy when they rested upon the young girl who answered to the name of Maddy. Their only daughter’s only child, she had lived with them since her mother’s death, for her father was a sea captain, who never returned from his last voyage to China, made two months before she was born. Very lonely and desolate would the home of Grandfather Markham have been without the presence of Madeline, but with her there, the old red farmhouse seemed to the aged couple like a paradise. Forty years they had lived there, tilling the rather barren soil of the rocky homestead, and, saving the sad night when they heard that Richard Clyde was lost at sea, and the far sadder morning when their daughter died, bitter sorrow had not come to them; and, truly thankful for the blessings so long vouchsafed them, they had retired each night in peace with God and man, and risen each morning to pray. But a change was coming over them. In an evil hour Grandpa Markham had signed a note for a neighbor and friend, who failed to pay, and so it all fell on Mr. Markham, who, to meet the demand, mortgaged his homestead; the recreant neighbor still insisting that long before the mortgage should be due, he certainly would be able himself to meet it. This, however, he had not done, and, after twice begging off a foreclosure, poor old Grandfather Markham found himself at the mercy of a grasping, remorseless man, into whose hands the mortgage had passed. It was vain to hope that Silas Slocum would wait. The money must either be forthcoming, or the red farmhouse be sold, with its few acres of land. Among his neighbors there was not one who had the money to spare, even if they had been willing to do so. And so he must look among strangers. “If I could only help,” Madeline had said one evening when they sat talking over their troubles; “but there’s nothing I can do, unless I apply for our school this summer. Mr. Green is committeeman; he likes us, and I don’t believe but what he’ll let me have it. I mean to go and see;” and, ere the old people had recovered from their astonishment, Madeline had caught her bonnet and shawl, and was flying down the road.