Madge Mortons Secret | Page 5

head quietly. She looked away from her niece.
"Yes, that is what I have told you. I am saving the silks until you are older. You have very little else of your mother's except her jewelry."
Madge clasped her hands together pleadingly. "O Aunt Sue! why must I wait until I am grown for those silks? I wish you to give them to Nellie and me now. Please, please do. I am sure we are old enough to appreciate them. Nellie would be a perfect dream in the pink silk, and I should dearly love to have the blue. We never, never can need the dresses more than we do now! Why, in two or three years Nellie and I may be rich! Who knows? What is the use in keeping them for some future time, when Nellie and I need them at the present moment? You know we ought to have one handsome gown apiece, Auntie. Mrs. Curtis and Madeleine are always beautifully dressed."
"Yes, Mother, please let Madge have her way," entreated Nellie. "But I can't accept one of the frocks. I wouldn't take it away from you for the world."
"Very well, Auntie," replied Madge, with a little choke in her voice. "I am sorry I mentioned the subject to you. I don't care for the silks, then. I won't even look at them, unless Nellie will take one of them."
"Silly Madge!" remonstrated Eleanor, coming up behind her cousin and tweaking a loose curl of her auburn hair. "I know you wish me to share everything with you, and I thank you just the same. But, Madge, I can't accept one of those dresses. Don't you see, they were your mother's, and that makes all the difference in the world."
"I can't see what difference it makes if I wish to do it. You always divide everything you have with me, and I don't see why you can't let me be generous for once."
Madge's eyes were misty. The thought of her mother and father made it hard for her to speak without emotion. "Besides," she added, smiling in her charming fashion, "I will never wear a pink gown. No one need try to persuade me. It wouldn't be in keeping with my red hair!"
Eleanor put her arm around her cousin. She understood the little quaver in Madge's laughing voice.
"Of course I will have the dress, if you feel that way about it," she said gently. "And I shall adore it. Why, I can see myself in it this minute, with a pink rose fastened in my hair. But all this time you and I have been arguing Mother has not yet said that you could use the silks. Please consent, Mother; there's a dear."
Mrs. Butler looked grave. "I suppose it is all right," she hesitated. "The silks belong to Madge and she is old enough to decide what she wishes to do with them. Look in my left-hand bureau drawer, Madge; you will find the key to your mother's trunk there. The silks are in the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a piece of old, yellow muslin. We might as well find out whether the material is still good before we decide what we will do about it. I must go back now to my jelly; it must be nearly done."
"Come up to the attic with me, won't you, Eleanor?" invited Madge.
Eleanor shook her head. She knew her cousin liked best to make these visits to her mother's trunk alone. "No," she answered, "I must help Mother with the jelly."
Nellie slipped quietly away and left Madge looking dreamily out on the elm-shaded lawn, her thoughts busy with the story of her own past and the little she knew of her father.
He had been a captain in the United States Navy, and one of the youngest officers in the service. The Mortons were an old Virginia family, and after Robert Morton's graduation from Annapolis he was rapidly promoted in the service. He had married Mrs. Butler's only sister, Eleanor, for whom Nellie was named. Two months after Madge's birth, while her husband was away on a cruise, Madge's mother died at her sister's home, and, as her father never came back to claim her, she had been brought up by her uncle and aunt. This was all she had been told of the story of her mother and father. It made her aunt unhappy to talk of them, so Madge had asked few questions as she grew to young womanhood. But to-day she felt that she would like to know whether her father had died and been buried at sea--she always thought of him as dead--or whether a tablet had ever been erected to his memory at Annapolis. She had never been to Annapolis, although it was not a great distance from