Guy Earlscourt's Wife — page 72: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“ey 66 After Fourteen Years. town of Speckhaven; and Rosanna’s dream was iealized of @ cottage in the country, with flower garden aud poultry yard. Once every year since then Duke had received a letter, containing fifty pounds, and all of those fifty pounds were safely nestled in Speckhaven Bank for Polly. Mr. Hawks- ley had gone to California when first the gold fever broke out there, and last Christmas, when his letter came, was there still; but whether making that promised fortune or not, Duke had no means of knowing, and Mr.. Hawksley never said. Polly knew him as her godfather, and was very much obliged to him, indeed, for his handsome presents, which con- stituted such a nice little sum for her‘in the bank. She wrote iim a letter every year since she first learned to write; but beyond this of herself or him she knew nothing. Duke still persevered in his old vocation, and was scene-painter-in- chief to Speckhaven Lyceum, and portrait painter to the town. | The fourteen years had glidee on smoothly, uneventfully— from which one evertful month shone out a bright oasis in the desert. Jie walked to Lyndith Grange sometimes, in the gray of the summer eveniuy, smoking his pipe, and thinking of that cold Mareh night <:o long ago, when the romance of his life began. Of the actors in that romance he had never seen anything, since the day he had bidden farewell to Rob- ert Irawksley. Of Mr. Geoffrey Lyndith, of Sir Vane and Lady Charteris, he never even heard the names. They might be all dead and buried, so completely had they dropped out of his life. The old Grange was utterly deserted now; the grim gateway would yield to any hand that chose to push it, but few ever chose. Stray artists who thought it pietur- esque in its decay, made sketches of it when the sun shone, but after nightfall neither artist nor peasant liked to linger in its gloomy precincts. Those visits, and an occasional look at his treasured opal ring, were all that remained to Duke, besides his bright Polly, to keep the memory of that past time alive. Dr. Worth still told the story of that rainy night, when he had been carried off bodily to the Grange; but peo- pie were getting tired of hearing it, and were more interested in the great house of the neighborhood, Montalien Priory, where great goings-on were this time taking place. Lord Montalien’s second son was just of age, on the third of June, ard there was to be a birthday celebration, and that’s why Polly stands here flushed, and swinging her gypsy hat by its rosy ribbons, and talking wits many gestures and vast inter- est to Rosanna. . “Dinner at sunset on the Yawn, Rosfnna,” the girl wa. eaving, with her face all alight; “all the tenantry and all the comicbooks.com