In his earnestness he grasped her arm, as if he thus would hold her, while the tears rained over his wrinkled face. For a moment Maddy made no response. She had no intention of leaving him, but the burden was pressing heavily and her tongue refused to move. Maddy was then a stranger to the religion which was sustaining her grandfather in his great trouble, but the teachings of her childhood had not been in vain. She was God’s covenant child. His protecting presence was over and around her, moving her to the right. New York, with its gay sights, her school, where in another year she was to graduate, the trip to the Catskills which Guy had promised Mrs. Agnes, Jessie and herself, Aikenside with its luxurious ease—all these must be given up, while, worse than all the rest, Guy, too, must be given up. He would not come there often; the place was not to his taste, and in time he would cease to care for her as he cared for her now. “Oh, that would be dreadful!” she groaned aloud, while here thoughts went backward to that night ride in the snowstorm, and the numberless attentions he had paid her then. She would never ride with him again—never; and Maddy moaned bitterly, as she began to realize for the first time how much she liked Guy Remington, and how the giving him up and his society was the hardest part of all. But Maddy had a brave young heart, and at last, winding her arms around her grandfather’s neck, she whispered: “I will not leave you, grandpa. I’ll stay in grandmother’s place.”
Surely Heaven would answer the blessings whispered over Maddy by the delighted old man, and the young girl taking so cheerfully the burden from which many would have shrunk, should be blessed by God.
With her grandfather’s hand upon her head, Maddy could almost feel that the blessing was descending; but when, in her own room, the one where she had lain sick for so many weary weeks, her courage began to give way, and the burden, magnified tenfold by her nervous weakness, looked heavier than she could bear. How could she stay there, going through each day with the same routine of literal drudgery—drudgery which would not end until the two for whom she made the sacrifice were dead.
“Oh, is there no way of escape, no help?” she moaned, as she tossed from side to side, “Must my life be wasted here. Surely—-”