Madeline by Mary Jane Holmes

It is the close of a calm September afternoon, and the autumnal sunlight falls softly upon Aikenside, where a gay party is now assembled. For four years Maddy Clyde has been mistress there, and in looking back upon them she wonders how so much happiness as she has known could be experienced in so short a time. Never but once has the slightest ripple of sorrow shadowed her heart, and that was when her noble husband, Guy, said to her, in a voice she knew was earnest and determined, that he could no longer remain deaf to his country's call-that where the battle storm was raging he was needed, and he must not stay at home. Then for a brief season her bright face was overcast, and her brown eyes dim with weeping. Giving him to the war seemed like giving him up to death. But women can be as true heroes as men; and stifling her own grief, Maddy sent him away with smiles and prayers and cheering words of encouragement, turning herself for consolation to the source from which she never sued for peace in vain; and, save that she missed her husband terribly, she was not lonely, for her beautiful dark-eyed boy, whom they called Guy, junior, kept her busy, while not many weeks after her husband's departure, Guy read with moistened eyes of a little golden-haired daughter, whom Maddy had named Lucy Atherstone, and gazed upon a curl of hair she inclosed, asking if it were not like some other hair now moldering back to dust within an English churchyard. "Maggie says it is," she wrote, alluding to the wife of Dr. Holbrook, who had come to Aikenside to stay, while her husband also did his duty as surgeon in the army.

That little daughter is a year-old baby now, and in her short white dress and coral bracelets sits neglected on the nursery floor, while her mother and Jessie and Maggie Holbrook hasten out into the yard, to welcome the returning soldier, Major Guy whose arm is in a sling, and whose face is very pale from the effects of wounds received at Gettysburg, where his daring courage had well-nigh won for Maddy a widow's heritage. For the present the arm is disabled, and so he has been discharged, and has come back to the home where warm words of welcome greet him, from the lowest servant up to his darling wife, who can only look her joy as he folds her in his well arm, and kisses her beautiful face. Only Margaret Holbrook seems a little sad, for she had hoped her husband would come with Guy, but his humanity would not permit him to leave the suffering beings who needed his care. Loving messages he sent to her, and her tears were dried when she heard from Guy how greatly he was beloved by the pale occupants of the beds of pain, and how much he was doing to relieve their anguish.