Geoffrey's Victory by Mrs Georgie Sheldon — page 287: what you’re looking at

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

“HE COLONEL’S STORY CONCLUDED. 983 our real wedding journey. Estelle shall have her money, then we will come back here for afew years longer, after which, if all continues to go well, we shall have no cause to regret Jabez Mapleson’s fortune.’ ‘‘T shall never forget the look of joy on her face when I made that promise, and all during the evening she was as gay as a child, and more lovely than I had everseen her. The next morning I was obliged to leave her for a couple of days. I had to go to the other mines, then to Santa Fe to make a deposit. My darling clung to me as I bade her good-by. Our boy was just two days old then. ‘«*My Will, my Will, somehow I cannot bear tc let you go this time, even for a day, and two will seem an age!" she said, as she kissed me again and again. Then she laughed at her own childishness, told me playfully, though with tears in her eyes, to begone before she repeated her folly.” A groan burst from the lips of the narrator at this point, and it seemed as if he would not be able to go on. Mr. Huntress and Geoffrey both shifted their position, for they could not bear to look upon his agonized face as he thus laid bare this sacred page of his heart. Mrs. Mapleson buried her face in her handkerchief, while every now and then a shudder ran through her frame. “She never kissed me again; she never called her ‘Will’ again; she never knew me again,” Colonel Mapleson went on, in a hol- low tone, ‘‘for she took a cold that verv day and was raving with delirium when I returned. She grew worse and worse, and in two weeks was-—dead. My bright, beautiful wife, whom I loved better than my own life, for whom I was willing to give up fortune, position, everything that I had hitherto held most dear, lay a lifeless thing of clay—gone from me like a breath, leaving me broken-hearted and with my reason nearly de- throned.” It was truly pitiable to witness the man’s emotion and his struggle for self-control. His frame shook like a tree swayed by the wind; his lips and his voice trembled so that it was difficult for him to articulate, | while his broad chest heaved convulsively with the anguished throbbing of his heart. “Well,” he said, after a while, “I must not dwell upon that | sad time, and I searcely know how I lived during the week that followed. We buried her in a quiet spot beneath.a mammoth tree, not a stone’s throw from our home, where she used often to sit on a warm summer’s day with some dainty bit of work in her hands. Yon have seen her grave, you say,” he interposed, turning to Geoffrey. ‘Does it look sadly neglected and over- grown? Is the stone defaced or the name obliterated by the storms of so many years?” ‘No, sir,” his son answered, looking up with moist eyes, for - EOMMIE! XOOL KS, (60) 3