Love stories; Montana -- Fiction; Religious fiction; Western stories
Sometimes she felt afraid something had happened to him. He might have
been thrown from that terrible train and killed, perhaps; and no one know
anything about it. But as her experience grew wider, and she travelled on
the trains herself, of course this fear grew less. She came to understand
that the world was wide, and many things might have taken him away from
his home.
Perhaps the money she had sent reached him safely, but she had put in no
address. It had not seemed right that she should. It would seem to draw
his attention to her, and she felt "the lady" would not like that. Perhaps
they were married by this time, and had gone far away to some charmed land
to live. Perhaps--a great many things. Only this fact remained; he never
came any more into the horizon of her life; and therefore she must try to
forget him, and be glad that God had given her a friend in him for her
time of need. Some day in the eternal home perhaps she would meet him and
thank him for his kindness to her, and then they might tell each other all
about the journey through the great wilderness of earth after they had
parted. The links in Elizabeth's theology had been well supplied by this
time, and her belief in the hereafter was strong and simple like a
child's.
She had one great longing, however, that he, her friend, who had in a way
been the first to help her toward higher things, and to save her from the
wilderness, might know Jesus Christ as he had not known Him when they were
together. And so in her daily prayer she often talked with her heavenly
Father about him, until she came to have an abiding faith that some day,
somehow, he would learn the truth about his Christ.
During the third season of Elizabeth's life in Philadelphia her
grandmother decided that it was high time to bring out this bud of
promise, who was by this time developing into a more beautiful girl than
even her fondest hopes had pictured.
So Elizabeth "came out," and Grandmother Brady read her doings and sayings
in the society columns with her morning coffee and an air of deep
satisfaction. Aunt Nan listened with her nose in the air. She could never
understand why Elizabeth should have privileges beyond her Lizzie. It was
the Bailey in her, of course, and mother ought not to think well of it.
But Grandmother Brady felt that, while Elizabeth's success was doubtless
due in large part to the Bailey in her, still, she was a Brady, and the
Brady had not hindered her. It was a step upward for the Bradys.
Lizzie listened, and with pride retailed at the ten-cent store the doings
of "my cousin, Elizabeth Bailey," and the other girls listened with awe.
And so it came on to be the springtime of the third year that Elizabeth
had spent in Philadelphia.
CHAPTER XV
AN EVENTFUL PICNIC
It was summer and it was June. There was to be a picnic, and Elizabeth was
going.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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