The Interval Before The Marriage

The doctor's next was opened, and Maddy read with blinding tears that
which for a moment increased her pain and sent to her bleeding heart
an added pang of disappointment, or a sense of wrong done to her, she
could not tell which. Dr. Holbrook was to be married the same day with
Lucy, and to Lucy's sister, Margaret.

"Maggie, I call her," he wrote, "because that name is so much like my
first love, Maddy, the little girl who though I was too old to be her
husband, and so made me very wretched for a time, until I met and knew
Margaret Atherstone. I have told her of you, Maddy; I would not marry
her without, and she seems willing to take me as I am. We shall come
home with Guy, who is the mere wreck of what he was when I last saw
him. He has told me, Maddy, all about it, and though I doubly respect
you now, I cannot say that I think you did quite right. Better that
one should suffer than two, and Lucy's is a nature which will forget
far sooner than yours or Guy's. I pity you all."

This almost killed Maddy; she did not love the doctor, but the
knowledge that he was to marry another added to her misery, while what
he said of her decision was the climax of the whole. Had her sacrifice
been for nothing? Would it have been better if she had not sent Guy
away? It was anguish unspeakable to believe so, and the shadowy woods
never echoed to so bitter a cry of pain as that with which she laid
her head on the ground, and for a brief moment wished that she might
die. God pitied His child then, and for the next half hour she hardly
knew what she suffered.