All night they sat beside the brave girl, and bit by bit heard her story. For days she was ill from the shock of her fearful experience. [pg 39] The wedding was very quiet, but George refused to have it deferred.
[pg 39]
It was months before the bride could summon courage to live at Crestdale, and she was a much older woman before she could refer with composure to Katie's murtherin' ghost.
[pg 40]
[pg 40]
Her Christmas Gift
A WHITE RIBBON STORY
She was born on Christmas Day, and so came, with her little white face and solemn eyes, into her pale mother's life. She was worse than fatherless. The beast of a man she might have come to call by that sacred name, would now be beside the snowy cot, weeping in maudlin rejoicing over his new treasure, if the mother had not resolutely put him away some six months before.
The world knew him as Judge Barrett, a man of fine family, superb talents, and a magnetic orator. He might be, perhaps, too convivial on occasions, but was not this a common frailty among Kentucky's great men? The wife knew him as besotted and disgusting. What mattered his learning, his eloquence, his aristocratic blood, or ample income? To her alone he brought his degraded mass of humanity day after day; and though never personally unkind to her, or to the little boy that died, she was enabled by the might of her tearless agony beside that tiny bier, to cut the last tie that bound her to the blear-eyed creature sobbing [pg 41] on the other side. The last tie? Ah, woe was she! The coming time brought into her desolate life the frail link she must now take up; and in the first bitter realization of her wronged womanhood, the mother-love lay dormant.
[pg 41]
As the months went by the little Ruth twined herself in every fiber about that lonely mother's heart, till she was loved with a love that was pain. So jealously guarded, too, that never once had the father's eyes fallen upon her, not even by chance. In vain he sent appeals just to look on his little daughter; he would ask no more. He was refused, and the baby's nurse did not dare transgress.
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