Maris by Hill Grace Livingston;

Author:Hill, Grace Livingston;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2016-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The rest of that day was very full. It seemed there was no time to do the things she wanted very much to do at once. Lexie was hard to please. She was hot and restless and wanted her mother. She wanted to have the window shades up and be given a picture book, both of which were against the doctor's orders, for her eyes must be guarded carefully.

Maris did her best to make the child happy, meantime letting her own thoughts run ahead with plans. But it was not until almost eight o'clock in the evening that the little patient was finally asleep and Maris was free to do what she would.

She slipped into her mother's room for a minute and saw her father lying on the cot, sleeping with a look of real rest on his face, and her heart was glad that she had been able to relieve him from at least one of his heavy burdens.

Quietly she slipped up to the attic and brought out the wedding invitations. She had a feeling somehow that she was committing burglary.

She had planned to burn them out in the incinerator, but when she touched their smooth, thick surfaces, the double envelopes making such bulky, firm white slabs, she realized that things like that wouldn't burn very easily. She would have to pull them out of their envelopes and burn them one by one. It wouldn't do to leave any traces of them about for Sally to wonder over and perhaps gossip about in the village.

Looking about her, she saw a large box of wood shavings that had come around the only wedding present she had as yet received. It was a great ugly, old-fashioned lamp sent to her by an old friend of the family, now in her nineties, who had moved out west some twenty years ago, when Maris was a baby. It was a hideous thing. The old lady had written that she had heard the Mayberrys' oldest girl was going to be married pretty soon, so she thought she would send her a present. It was a lamp that had been given to her as a wedding present, and she thought Maris might like to have it because it was so old.

It was an oil lamp with a terrible glass shade on which a floral decoration had been poorly painted. Maris had looked at it in despair and written a nice little note of thanks and then hastily gathered up its parts and dumped the whole thing in the attic out of the way, for it came to her that it would never do to let Tilford see that lamp!

So here it was beside her as she turned to go down with her boxes of invitations, an ugly old lamp lying in a great lot of shavings. Just the thing to start the thick envelopes burning.

Quickly she removed the lamp and took the box down with her. Soon those carefully addressed invitations were roaring up in smoke into the summer night, licked by crackling flames.

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