"Yes, father and mother both, and loved them too. Listen to me,
Maude, while I tell you of the past. Though it seems so long ago, I
was a schoolgirl once, and nightly in my arms there slept a fair-
haired, blue-eyed maiden, four years my junior, over whom I
exercised an elder sister's care. She loved me, this little blue-
eyed girl, and when your brother first spoke to me I seemed again to
hear her voice whispering in my ear, 'I love you, beautiful Maude.'"
"It was mother--it was mother!" and Maude Remington drew nearer to
the excited woman, who answered: "Yes, it was your mother, then little Matty Reed; we were at school
together in New Haven, and she was my roommate. We were not at all
alike, for I was wholly selfish, while she found her greatest
pleasure in ministering to others' happiness; but she crossed my
path at last, and then I thought I hated her."
"Not my mother, lady. You could not hate my mother!" and the blind
eyes flashed as if they would tear away the veil of darkness in
which they were enshrouded, and gaze upon a woman who could hate
sweet Matty Remington.
"Hush, child! don't look so fiercely at me," said Maude Glendower.
"Upon your mother's grave I have wept that sin away, and I know I am
forgiven as well as if her own soft voice had told me so. I loved
your father, Maude, and this was my great error. He was a distant
relative of your mother, whom he always called his cousin. He
visited her often, for he was a college student, and ere I was aware
of it, I loved him, oh, so madly, vainly fancying my affection was
returned. He was bashful, I thought, for he was not then twenty-one,
and by way of rousing him to action. I trifled with another--with
Dr. Kennedy," and she uttered the name spitefully, as if it were
even now hateful to her.
"I know it--I know it," returned Maude, "he told me that when he
first talked with me of you, but I did not suppose the dark-eyed
student was my father."
"It was none other," said Mrs. Kennedy, "and you can form some
conception of my love for him, when I tell you that it has never
died away, but is as fresh within my heart this night as when I
walked with him upon the College Green and he Called me 'Cousin
Maude,' for he gave me that name because of my fondness for Matty,
and he sealed it with a kiss.