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Then back across the meadow Guy bore her to the cottage, where Flora, just returned from a neighbor's, whither she had gone upon an errand, was looking for her in much affright, and wondering who had come from Aikenside with that wet, tired horse, showing so plainly how hard it had been driven.
"There's Aikenside," he said, at last, and it was not long before they passed through the gate, guarded by the great bronze lions, and struck into the graveled road leading to the house. "It's grander, finer, than I ever dreamed. Oh! if I could some time have just such a home! and doctor, look! What does make that water go up in the air so? Is it what they call a fountain?"
But Maddy took instead a stool, and leaning her elbow on the chair, turned her face fully toward him, waiting for him to speak. "Maddy," he began, "are you happy here at Aikenside?" "Oh, yes, very, very happy," and Maddy's soft eyes shone with the happiness she tried to express.
Remington, she had been admitted, and who, in Aikenside, was looked upon with envy, could have nothing in common with the red cottage or its inmates. So when Jessie asked again if she could not visit Maddy on the morrow, she answered decidedly: "No, daughter, no.
It would be a relief to talk with some one of that terrible pain, which grew worse every day; of that intense longing just for one sight of the beloved one; of Guy, still absent from Aikenside, wandering nobody knew where; and so Maddy told the whole story, while the dying man listened to her, and smoothing her silken hair, tried to comfort her. "The worst is not over yet," he said.
All that night she was working to pay the debt, giving the money herself into the hands of Guy Remington, whom she had never seen, but who came up in her dreams the tall, handsome-looking man she had so often heard described by Sarah Jones after her return from Aikenside.
If there had, she would have said yes, for Agnes was not averse to changing her state of widowhood. She liked the doctor, but if he did not propose, and some other body did, she should accept that other body, of course. This was her intention when she left Aikenside, and when she came back, it was with the determination to raise the siege at once, and compel the doctor to surrender.
Guy was in the best of spirits. For an entire half day he had tried to devise some means to getting Maddy up to Aikenside. It was quite too bad for her to spend the whole vacation at the cottage, as she seemed likely to do. He knew she was lonely there; that the bare floor and low, dark walls affected her unpleasantly.
Grandma Markham was dead, and the covered sleigh, which late in the afternoon plowed its way heavily back to Aikenside, carried only Mrs.
"Yes, Guy's rich and handsome, and everybody likes him. We were in college together." "You were?" Maddy exclaimed. "Then you know him well, and Jessie, and you've been to Aikenside often? There's nothing in the world I want so much as to go to Aikenside. They say it is so beautiful."
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