Other women, too, caught Biddy’s spirit and scrubbed their floors and their children’s faces on the day when Miss McDonald was expected to call, and when she came her silk dress and pretty shawl were watched narrowly lest by some chance a speck of dirt should fasten on them, and her becoming dress and handsome face were commented on and remembered as some fine show which had been seen for nothing.  Especially did the children like her in her bright dress, and the velvet and ermine in which she was clad when Guy met her in the Park were worn more for their sakes than for the gaze of those to whom such things were no novelties.  To Guy she looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her before, and there was in his heart a smothered feeling as of a want of something lost, as her carriage disappeared from view and he lost sight of the fair face and form which had once been his own.

The world was going well with Guy, for though Dick Trevylian had paid no part of the hundred thousand dollars, and he still lived in the brown cottage on the hill, he was steadily working his way to competency, if not to wealth.  His profession as a lawyer, which he had resumed, yielded him a remunerative income, while his contributions to different magazines were much sought after, so that to all human appearance he was prosperous and happy.  Prosperous in his business, and happy in his wife and little ones, for there was now a second child, a baby Guy of six weeks old, and when on his return from New York the father bent over the cradle of his boy and kissed his baby face, that image seen in the Park seemed to fade away, and the caresses he gave to Julia had in them no faithlessness or insincerity.  She was a noble woman, and had made him a good wife, and he loved her truly, though with a different, less absorbing, less ecstatic love than he had given to Daisy.  But he did not tell her of Miss McDonald.  Indeed, that name was never spoken now, nor was any reference ever made to her except when little Daisy asked where was the lady for whom she was named, and why she did not send her a doll.

“I hardly think she knows there is such a chit as you,” Guy said to her once, when sorely pressed on the subject, and then the child wondered how that could be, and wished she was big enough to write her a letter and ask her to come and see her.

Every day after that little Daisy played “make b’lieve Miss McDolly” was there, said McDolly being represented by a bundle of shawls tied up to look like a figure and seated in a chair.  At last there came to the cottage a friend of Julia’s, a young lady from New York, who knew Daisy, and who, while visiting in Cuylerville, accidentally learned that she was the divorced wife of whose existence she knew, but of whom she had never spoken to Mrs. Thornton.  Hearing the little one talking one day to Miss McDolly and asking her why she never wrote nor sent a “sing” to her sake-name, the young lady said: