The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864, page 49 by Various Authors
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dridge, my dear old housekeeper, has just been in. She wishes to know whether the new curtains of the little library are to be crimson or gray. She little knows what confusion she causes me! She knows not that I am no longer master here! I tell her I will deliberate on the point, and she retires mystified by my unusual indecision. So write quickly and make known your desires, if you wish to save me from an imputation of becoming, as the good old-lady says, 'a little set and bachelor-like in my ways.' Marmaduke and ---- come down next week to shoot.... You say, wait till spring, when things will be more propitious for disclosing our marriage. I have also another scheme which will be ripened by spring. I shall disclose our marriage, and propose to your father to make him independent of his ward. No one, certainly, has a better right to do this than his son-in-law; and then----But I hardly dare to think of the happiness that will be mine when nothing but death can part us any more!"
"One evening about this time," continued Madame, "about a week after Lina had shown me this letter, I came down into the cabinet de musique on my way to the garden to take my usual evening walk on the terrace, and saw Lina standing by the piano with her bonnet on and her shawl laid beside her. In her hand she held letters, one of which she had that moment unsealed. She had, I knew, just returned from the post-office.
"'I have a letter here from Mrs. Baxter, Madame,' she said. 'She writes to me in great distress; the two children, Minnie and Louisa, whom she was so anxious to send here, are both ill with scarlet-fever. But here is your letter; she will no doubt tell you everything herself.'
"I took the letter and seated myself, and was soon absorbed in the poor mother's hurried and almost incoherent relation, when suddenly I was startled by a gesture or sound from Lina that made me look up hastily. She stood with the letter she had been reading crushed in her hand, her face wearing an expression of agony.