CHAPTER XXXI. MAUDE AND TOM. It was then that Maude left him and went back to the house, where, standing in the door, she scanned the face and person of the man for whose safety in part she had pledged her heart and hand. Tom’s _tout ensemble_ was good, and there was about him a certain air of grace and culture which showed itself in every movement. A stranger would have trusted him in a moment, and recognized the true manhood in his expressive face. And Maude recognized it, as she never had before, and the contrast between him and Arthur struck her painfully. “If Arthur were more like him, I could love him better,” she thought, just as the Judge asked the abrupt question: “You have a wife, hey?” “Of course he has,” Maude thought, and still she listened for the answer. “My wife died some years ago, before the war broke out. She was a Mary Williams, a near relative of the Williamses of Charleston. Perhaps you know them?” “Know ’em! I’ll bet I do!—the finest family in the State. And you married one of them?” the old Judge said, his manner indicating an increased respect for the man who had married a Williams of Charleston. Maude knew the family, too, or rather knew of them, and remembered how, some years before, when she was at St. Mary’s, she had heard a Charleston young lady speaking of a Mrs. Carleton from Boston, who had recently died, and whose husband had been so kind and patient and tender, and was “the most perfectly splendid looking man she ever saw.” Maude remembered this last distinctly, because it had called forth a reproof from the teacher who had overheard it, and who asked what kind of a man “the most perfectly splendid looking” one could be. Maude had not thought of that incident in years, but it came back to her now as she stood close to the man who had been so kind and tender to his sick, dying wife. He would be all that, she knew, for his manner was so quiet and grave and gentle, and then a great throb of pain swept over Maude De Vere as she thought of Arthur and the pledge she had given him. Maude could not analyze her feelings, or understand why the knowing who Tom Carleton was, and that he was also free, should make the world so desolate all on a sudden, and blot out the brightness of the summer day which had seemed so pleasant at its beginning. “I did it in part for him,” she said, feeling that in spite of her pain there was something sweet even in such a sacrifice. She was still standing in the door, when Tom, turning a little more toward his host, saw her, his face lighting up at once, and the smile, which made him so handsome, breaking out about his mouth and showing his fine teeth. “Ah, Miss De Vere, take this seat,” and with that well-bred politeness so much a part of his family, he arose and offered her his chair. But Maude declined it, and took a seat instead upon a little camp stool near to the vine-wreathed columns of the piazza.