Hugh and Alice

Sometimes the wild thought crossed his mind that possibly he might win
her for himself, but it was repudiated as soon as formed, and so,
between hope and a kind of blissful despair, blissful so long as Alice
stayed with him as she was now, Hugh lived on, until at last the evening
came when Adah was to leave Spring Bank on the morrow. She had intended
going immediately after the sale at Mosside, but Willie had been ailing
ever since, and that had detained her. Everything which Alice could do
for her had been done. Old Sam, at thoughts of parting with his little
charge, had cried his dim eyes dimmer yet. Mrs. Worthington, too, had
wept herself nearly sick, for now that the parting drew near she began
to feel how dear to her was the young girl who had come to them so
strangely.

"More like a daughter you seem to me," she had said to Adah, in speaking
of her going; "and once I had a wild--" here she stopped, leaving the
sentence unfinished, for she did not care to tell Adah of the shock it
had given her when Hugh first pointed out to her the faint mark on
Adah's forehead.

It was fainter now even than then, for with increasing color and health
it seemed to disappear, and Mrs. Worthington could scarcely see it, when
with a caressing movement of her hand she put the silken hair back from
Adah's brow and kissed the bluish veins.

"There is none there. It was all a fancy," she murmured to herself, and
then thinking of 'Lina, she said to Adah what she had all along meant to
say, that if the Richards' family should question her of 'Lina, she was
to divulge nothing to her disparagement, whether she were rich or poor,
high or low. "You must not, of course, tell any untruths. I do not ask
that, but I--oh, I sometimes wish they need not know that you came from
here, as that would save all trouble, and 'Lina is so--so--"