We are sitting in rather melancholy mood after dinner, talking of the poor young husband and wife, when Mr Ogilvie is announced, and I hasten to the door to meet him.
‘She will not see me!’ he says impetuously, coming in without any formal greeting. ‘She has shut herself into her room, and calls to me with hysterical tears that she is too dreadful to look upon, that I shall cease to love her as soon as I behold her, and that she cannot face it.’ And the strong man falls into a chair with a sob.
‘I don’t care how bad it is,’ he cries; ‘she need not doubt my love. My poor darling will always be the same to me whether she has lost her beauty or not.’
Whereupon I extend my hand to him and shake his heartily; and I know my wife has great difficulty in restraining herself from enveloping him in her motherly arms and embracing him.
‘We must resort to stratagem,’ I say. ‘I will go down to the cottage at once, and you follow me in ten minutes with my wife. I will try and coax Mrs Ogilvie to come out and speak to me, and you must steal upon her unawares.’
Mrs Ogilvie at first refuses to see or speak to me; but I go up to her door and am mean enough to remind her of my wife’s devotion to her and entreat her, for her sake, to come down to me.
‘I left him at home with Mary Anne,’ I reply, feeling that I am worthy of being a diplomatist at the court of St Petersburg, as she opens the door and descends the stairs. I take her out into the garden and begin to reprove her for her conduct, with assumed anger. She listens with eyes blinded by tears. I, on the look-out for it, hear the latch of the garden gate click; but she, absorbed in her sorrow, does not notice it. I look up and see Frank Ogilvie’s eyes fixed hungrily on his wife. Her changed appearance must be an awful shock to him; but he bears it bravely; and in a moment he has sprung forward, clasped her in his arms, and the poor scarred face is hidden on his true and loving heart!
Then Mary Anne and I turn silently away, and leave him to teach her that there are things more valuable, of far higher worth than any mere beauty of face or form.
After all, we do not lose her, for Mr Ogilvie coming into some money, leaves the navy and purchases a small estate in our neighbourhood, on which they still reside. Mrs Ogilvie is no longer young, and has a family of lads and lasses around her, who inherit much of their mother’s loveliness. But one of the first things she teaches them is not to set a fictitious value on it; ‘for,’ she says, ‘I thought too much of mine, and God took it from me.’ No one ever hears her regret the loss of her beauty; ‘for through that trial,’ she tells my wife, ‘I learned to know the true value of my Frank’s heart.’