The Heart's Highway by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
page 63 of 244 (25%)
page 63 of 244 (25%)
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she cried as passionately as a lad might have done, and I frowned,
not with jealousy, but with a curious dislike to such affection from one maid to another, which I could never understand in myself. Had Cicely Hyde had a lover, she would have said that fond speech to him instead of Mary Cavendish, but lover she had none. But all at once the two maids nudged one another, and turned their faces, all convulsed with merriment, and I looked and saw that the poor little black lass had crept on hands and knees to where the mirror flashed in the grass, and was looking at her face therein with such anxiety as might move one at once to tears and laughter, to see if the dew had washed her white. But Mary Cavendish ceased all in a minute her mirth, and went up to the black child and took the mirror from her, and said, in the sweetest voice of pity I ever heard, "'Tis not in one May dew nor two, nor perchance in the dews of many years, you can wash your face white, but sometime it will be." Then the black wench burst into tears, and begged in that thick, sluggishly sweet tongue of hers to know if ever the May dew would wash her black away, and Mistress Mary answered as seriously as if she were in the pulpit on the Sabbath day that it would sometime most surely and she should see her face in the glass as fair as any. Then the two maids, Mary Cavendish and Cicely Hyde, went into the house, and left me, as I said before, to wonder at that spirit of youth which can all in a minute disregard care and anxiety and risk of death for the play of vanity. But, after all, which be stronger, wars and rumours of wars or vanity? And which be older, and which |
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