Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1908 — HER MAY MORNING. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HER MAY MORNING.

By CECILY ALLEN.

Copyrighted, 1908, by Associated Literary Press.

The world said Eleanor Carey would never marry again. Her first matrimonial experience had not been strewn with roses, though money for their purchase had not been lacking. And the events of her widowhood had been enough to turn any woman hard, cynical and unromantlc.

Not that Eleanor Carey looked either hard or imbittered as she presided over Mrs. De Witt Smith's tea table one balmy April afternoon. Robed in soft, clinging topaz colored silk, with heavy Incrustations of lace—the famed Carey laces—she looked not a day older than the daughter of the household who was that day making her social delmt. And. indeed, in point of years the fair debutante had little advantage over the fairer widow whose coming out bad been followed almost directly by her marriage with Henry Carey, retired broker, multimillionaire and confirmed bachelor.

Younger men had envied the fishy eyed groom. Older women had envied the radiant bride who rumor said had acquiesced smilingly in hbr bold Bale In the matrimonial market.

That she had paid the price of family honor and her father’s good name with outward calm and Inward revulsion was something Dame Grundy never guessed. Her reward' came sooner than she had dared to hope. Henry Carey died within a year of their marriage, and then came what rumor said was enough to harden any woman. Ghosts of Carey’s ugly past trouped forth after the reading of the will. His first cousin, apparently well started on his elder relative’s downward path, first laid siege to the widow’s heart and, being repulsed, then started the contest which had made Eleanor’s face familiar to ever!newspaper reader in America and arraigned the dead man in all the baldness of money drunk eccentricities. That any woman could believe in any man after going through what Eleanor Carey had gone through was past even the belief of her own somewhat cynical social set. So far Eleanor’s attorneys bad held out against the siege for the millions left entirely to her. So far Eleanor Carey had never been interviewed -by either public reporter or private friend. She had simply resumed her place in society after laying aside her mourning and let the legal and social tongueswag. So It happened that three men who had eocne to pay their respects to Mrs. Do Witt Smith and bort youngest daughter lingered to ptey court to the Musidlag aaataa at the tea tterfa.

'One of these was Dr. Dalton, a man who had won his spurs in the world of medicine despite a large family fortune and assured social position. The second, Jimmy Darnton, was a newly made copper king from the northwest, whose family, well known in the eastern social whirl, had. sent him west to be forgotten as the family ne’er-do-well and were now only too glad to remember him and receive him with open arms. Neither of these men could be accused of caring how Henry Carey’s fortune was finally disposed of. The third man was Donald Gregory, born of a stern Scotch father and a mercurial French mother In the storm locked New England town where Eleanor Carey had lived in her girlhood. In his father’s eyes the young chap had wasted what should have been a useful youth. Today the stern old father unfortunately was not alive to witness the artistic triumphs of his son, but the mercurial little mother was waiting to welcome him In the New England town. He would have joined her days before but for having met Eleanor Carey the very day of his arrival In New York from Paris. And to each of these three men Eleanor Carey had given the same reply, as quietly and unemotionally as she had laid the extra lump of sugar on the saucer beside their cup of tea. *T am going to Craigmere the first the month. If it is for the best, I win send tor you to come there.”

All the world seemed a-movlng the morning of May 1. Worried middle Class housewives wrangled with impertinent van and storage men, and humbler families carried their belongings or shoved them from old homes to new in a borrowed pushcart. Eleanor Carey’s town house was as serene as if the entire establishment, retinue of servants, canaries. Angora kittens, mistress and all were not to be removed that very afternoon to Craigmere. The mistress of the menage, in billowy masses of lace, awaited her morning mail and her coffee. When the latter had been served the maid reentered the room laden with letters and parcels. There were violets and lilies of the valley from Dr. Dalton, a corsage bouquet large enough to hide the front of Mrs. Carey’s traveling coat From Jimmy Darnton there were pink roses, long stemmed, perfectly tinted and crystalline with dew showered by the florist’s rubber sprayer. There were bulky envelopes from her lawyers and doffodlls from * girlish admirer. There were whines from individual mendicants and carefully phrased appeals from charity organizations. And, last the maid, with a correctly blank expression on her face, handed her mistress a curious floral offering, a basket made of soft willow twigs Interwoven and lined with damp moss, which overflowed with the most commonplace flowers—violets with only a faint woodland odor, a few sprigs of late arbutus, many, many faintly tinted hepaticas and some dainty Quaker ladies. Silently she sat fingering the fragile blossoms while her < deft fingered maid arranged the pink roses and the hothouse violets. At last, with a long drawn sigh, Eleanor Carey opened the envelope tied to the May basket by a blade of stout grass. “My dear little sweetheart of long ago,” it ran, “do you suppose for one Instant that I Intend to wait for you to bld me come to Craigmere? I will be there to bid you welcome—not on the stately terrace of your Italian villa, but down In the woods where I gathered these. And, what Is more, I want you to’come to me with clean hands and—an empty purse. Send for your lawyers. Tell them to take what they want and give the rest to the bounds who are fighting you. Turn your back on it all—the ghastly skeletons of the past, the scandal, the publicity, the bitterness of it all. You have never had a happy day since your purse was lined with his gold. Come, love; ’tls May day, and the world Is still young for you and me. Be the queen of my May today and for every. May day to oome. I am waiting.” For almost an hour Utemww Carey sat there, the’spring blossoms fading under her hot clasped hands Her breakfast turned cold. Her maM slipped in and out of the room, silent and apparently unobserving. Then her mistress turned to her soManly. “Adeii»e,caH my you tao<

the number, Broad. Tell Jenkins we will take the 1:45 Instead of the 3J.0 train for Craigmere. That is all.” At 4 o’clock that afternoon Donald Gregory waited on a moss grown log in the wood adjoining Craigmere. All around him bloomed the unfragrant, exquisitely tinted wild flowers, while dogwood petals fell in a snowy shower on thick moss and modest blooms alike. His Parisian friends would hardly recognize him. Gone was the Vandyck beard, gone the shabby corduroys, the flowing tie. In their stead Gregory was clean shaven as In the old days when he had made and filled Eleanor’s May basket year after year. For the corduroys he wore a light gray suit, a soft madras outing shirt, a soft gray silk tie. He looked the boyish lover, not the successful artist And* toward him, treading the pathway among the dogwood petals, came the lady of his heart clad in a simple frock of blue and white wash stuff and a low flat hat wreathed with flowers. She held out her hands. He took them and the smiling woman to bls heart. “Dear girl,” he murmured In her ear, “it is good to be young in May.” And the woman raised her eyes to his, eyes from which had passed every trace of bitterness and anxiety and disappointment, as she answered steadfastly, "Yes, Donald; it is good!”

"MY DEAR LITTLE SWEETHEART OF LONG AGO," IT RAN.