The Legacy Of Richard Hughes by Margaret Lynn

When Richard Hughes, the last of his family, left his mother's old home to John and Rachel Marquis, no one had wondered. Rachel was a sort of cousin and John, too, a distant connection by somebody's marriage. And they lived in the town and nothing was more natural than that he should give them a home there, and whatever else he had to leave.

What no one knew but Rachel was that Richard Hughes had wished to marry her, and that she had refused him and chosen John Marquis instead. Richard Hughes, fifteen years her senior, quiet and inexpressive, shut in with books and remote from life, was far less to her mind than John Marquis, who was of her own generation, with whom she went to parties and talked the light talk of youth, and had a thousand things in common, as she thought. John was bright and jolly, and played tennis and danced with her and took her out in a canoe, and was sweet-tempered and loved to laugh, and between times talked seriously about the business he was starting and the money he expected to make. John belonged to the whole format of her life at that time, and it was perfectly natural to choose to marry him, with the expectation that life would go on as she and John had both known it and liked it in other homes, comfortable, sensible, ambitious of practical things, real, as their kind would call it.