Other women, too, caught Biddy’s spirit and scrubbed their floors and
their children’s faces on the day when Miss McDonald was to call, and
when she came, she was watched narrowly, lest by some chance a speck of
dirt should fall upon her, and her becoming dress and handsome face were
commented on and remembered as some fine show which had been seen for
nothing. Especially did the children like her in her bright dress, and
the velvet and ermine in which she was clad when Guy met her in the Park
were worn more for their sakes, than for the gaze of those to whom such
things were no novelties. To Guy she looked more beautiful than he had
ever seen her before, and there was in his heart a feeling like a want
of something lost, as her carriage disappeared from, view and he lost
sight of the fair face and form which had once been his own.
The world was going well with Guy, for though Dick Trevylian had paid no
part of the one hundred thousand dollars, and he still lived in the
Brown Cottage on the hill, he was steadily working his way to
competency, if not to wealth. His profession as lawyer, which he had
resumed, yielded him a remunerative income, while his contributions to
different magazines were much sought after, so that to all human
appearance he was prosperous and happy. Prosperous in his business, and
happy in his wife and little ones, for there was now a second child, a
baby Guy of six weeks old, and when on his return from New York the
father bent over the cradle of his boy, and kissed his baby face, that
image seen in the Park seemed to fade away, and the caresses he gave to
Julia had in them no faithlessness or insincerity. She was a noble
woman, and had made him a good wife, and he loved her truly, though with
a different, less absorbing, less ecstatic love than he had given to
Daisy. But he did not tell her of Miss McDonald. Indeed, that name was
never spoken now, nor was any reference ever made to her except when the
little Daisy sometimes asked where was the lady for whom she was named,
and why she did not send her a doll.
"I hardly think she knows there is such a chit as you," Guy said to her
once, when sorely pressed on the subject; and then the child wondered
how that could be; and wished she was big enough to write her a letter
and ask her to come and see her.
Every day after that little Daisy played "make b’leve Miss Mack-Dolly"
was there, said Mack-Dolly being represented by a bundle of shawls tied
up to look like a figure and seated in a chair. At last there came to
the cottage a friend of Julia’s, a young lady from New York, who knew
Miss McDonald, and who, while visiting in Cuylerville, accidentally
learned that she was the divorced wife, of whose existence she knew, but
of whom she had never spoken to Mrs. Thornton. Hearing the little one
talking one day to Miss Mack-Dolly, asking her why she never wrote, nor
sent a "sing" to her _sake-name_, the young lady said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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