What Christian Authors are Saying about Grace Livingston Hill:
Grace Livingston Hill, often referred to as the “Queen of Christian Romance,” has given millions of readers timeless Christian novels, offering inspiration, romance, and adventure. The simple message in each of her books reminds us that God has the answer to all our questions.
—Wanda E. Brunstetter, New York Times bestselling author
I’ve long been a fan of Grace Livingston Hill. Her romance and attention to detail has always captivated me—even as a young girl. I’m excited to see these books will continue to be available to new generations and highly recommend them to readers who haven’t yet tried them. And for those of you like me who have read the books, I hope you’ll revisit the stories and fall in love with them all over again.
—Tracie Peterson, award-winning, bestselling author of the Song of Alaska and Striking a Match series
Grace Livingston Hill’s books are a treasured part of my young adult years. There was such bedrock faith to them along with the fun. Her heroines were intrepid yet vulnerable. Her heroes were pure of heart and noble (unless they needed to be reformed of course). And the books were often adventures. Just writing this makes me want to hunt down and read again a few of my favorites.
—Mary Connealy, Carol Award–winning author of Cowboy Christmas and the Lassoed in Texas series
Grace Livingston Hill books were a big part of my life, from the time I was a teenager and onward. My mother loved her books and shared them with me and my sisters. We always knew we could find an engaging, uplifting story between the covers. And her stories are still enjoyable and encouraging. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but The Girl from Montana and Marcia Schuyler are two of my favorites. Terrific stories!
—Susan Page Davis, author of The Ladies’ Shooting Club and Prairie Dreams series
The hero, in Grace Livingston Hill’s timeless romantic novels, is always a hero. The heroine is always a strong woman who stands up for her beliefs. He is always handsome; she is always beautiful. And an inviting message of faith is woven throughout each story without preaching. These enduring stories will continue to delight a new generation of readers—just as they did for our great-grandmothers.
—Suzanne Woods Fisher, bestselling author of the Lancaster County Secret series
As a young reader just beginning to know what romance was all about, I was introduced to Grace Livingston Hill’s books. She created great characters with interesting backgrounds and then plopped them down into fascinating settings where they managed to get into romantic pickles that kept me reading until the love-conquers-all endings. Her romance-filled stories showed this young aspiring writer that yes, love can make the fictional world go round.
—Ann H. Gabhart, award-winning author
My grandmother was an avid reader, and Grace Livingston Hill’s books lined her shelves for the years of my childhood and adolescence. Once I dipped into one of them, I was hooked. Years of reading Hill’s stories without a doubt influenced my own desire to become a storyteller, and it’s with great fondness that I remember many of her titles.
—Tracy L. Higley, author of Garden of Madness
If you’ve enjoyed the classic works of writers like Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, it is way past time for you to discover the inspirational stories of Grace Livingston Hill!
—Anna Schmidt, award-winning author of the Women of Pinecraft series
Ah, Grace Livingstone Hill! Can any other writer compare? Her lyrical, majestic tone, her vivid descriptions … they melt the heart of readers from every generation. Some of my fondest memories from years gone by involve curling up in my mother’s chair and reading her Grace Livington Hill romances. They swept me away to places unknown and reminded me that writers—especially writers of faith—could truly impact their world.
—Janice Hanna Thompson, author of the Weddings by Bella series
Grace Livingston Hill’s stories are like taking a stroll through a garden in the spring: refreshing, fragrant, and delightful—a place you’ll never want to leave.
—MaryLu Tyndall, Christy nominee and author of the Surrender to Destiny series
Enduring stories of hope, triumph over adversity, and true sacrificial love await every time you pick up a Grace Livingston Hill romance.
—Erica Vetsch, author of A Bride’s Portrait of Dodge City, Kansas
© 2012 by Grace Livingston Hill
Print ISBN 978-1-61626-658-5
eBook Editions:
Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-60742-854-1
Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-60742-855-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.
All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.
Cover design: Faceout Studio, www.faceoutstudio.com
Published by Barbour Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.barbourbooks.com
Our mission is to publish and distribute inspirational products offering exceptional value and biblical encouragement to the masses.
Printed in the United States of America.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Author Bio
Chapter 1
Early 1920s
The letter lay on the top of the pile of mail on the old mahogany desk, a square envelope of thick parchment with high, dashing handwriting and faint, subtle fragrance.
The man saw it the instant he entered the room. It gave him a sick dull thrust like an unexpected blow in the pit of his stomach. He had come back to the home of his childhood after hard years to rest, and here was this!
It was from his former wife, Lilla, and no word from her in all the twelve years since their divorce had ever brought anything but disgust and annoyance.
He half turned toward the door with an impulse of retreat but thought better of it and stalked over to the desk, tearing open the envelope roughly as if to have the worst over quickly. It began abruptly, as Lilla would. He could see the white jeweled fingers flying across the page, the half-flippant fling of the pen. Somehow the very tilt of the letters as she had formed them contrived to give the taunting inflection of her voice as he read.
Well, Pat, the time is up, and as the court decreed I am sending you your daughter. I hope you haven’t forgotten, for it would be rather awkward for the poor thing. I’m going to be married in a few days now and wouldn’t know what to do with her. She’s fourteen and has your stubbornness, but she’s not so bad if you let her have her own way in everything. Don’t worry, she’s the kind that marries youn
g, and she’ll probably take herself off your hands soon. I wish you well of your task.
Lilla
He sat back in the old mahogany chair and steadied his arms on the chair arms. The paper was shaking in his fingers. Something inside of him began to tremble. He had a feeling that it was his soul that was shaking. Like quicksilver along his veins the weakness ran, like quicksands his strength slid away from beneath his groping feet. He had not known that a man in his prime could be so puny, so helpless. Why, all the little particles of his flesh were quivering! His lips were trembling like an old person’s. He was like a frail ship being tossed in the trough of great waves. He could not right himself nor get any hold on his self-control. He could not seem to think what it all meant. He tried to read it over again and found the words dancing before his eyes with strange, grotesque amusement at his horror, like the look in Lilla’s eyes when she knew she had hit one hard in a sensitive spot. His daughter!
He had not seen her since she was two years old, and had taken very little notice of her then. His mind had been too much filled with horror and disappointment to notice the well-suppressed infant who spent her days in a nursery at the top of the house when she was not out in the park with her nurse. A memory of ribbons and frills, pink-and-whiteness, and a stolid stare from a pair of alien eyes that were all too much like Lilla’s to make any appeal to his fatherhood—that was his child, all he could recall of her. Even her name, he remembered bitterly, had been a matter of contention. Athalie, the name of a heathen queen! That had been her mother’s whim. She said it was euphonious. Athalie Greeves! And she had enjoyed his horror and distaste. And now this child with the heathen name was coming home to him!
He had looked on her as an infant still. He had not realized in the big, sharp experiences of the life he was living that the years were flying by. It could not be fourteen years! He had heard the judge’s decree that the child was to remain with her mother until she reached the age of fourteen years, and was then to pass to the guardianship of her father, but he had thought he would not be living when that came to pass. He had felt that his life was over. He had only to work hard enough and fill every moment with something absorbing, and he would wear out early. But here he was, a young man yet, with honors upon him, and new vistas opening up in his intellectual life in spite of the blighted years behind him; and here was this child of his folly, suddenly grown up and flung upon him, as if his mistakes would not let him go but were determined to drag him back and claim him for their own!
He bowed his head upon his arms and groaned aloud.
Patterson Greeves, brilliant scholar, noted bacteriologist, honored in France for his feats of bravery and his noted discoveries along the line of his chosen profession, which had made it possible to save many lives during the war; late of Siberia where he had spent the time after the signing of the armistice doing reconstruction work and making more noteworthy discoveries in science; had at last come back to his childhood home after many years, hoping to find the rest and quiet he needed in which to write the book for which the scientific world was clamoring, and this had met him on the very doorstep as it were and flung him back into the horror of the tragedy of his younger days.
In his senior year of college, Patterson Greeves had fallen in love with Alice Jarvis, the lovely daughter of the Presbyterian minister in the little college town where he had spent the years of his collegiate work.
Eagerly putting aside the protests of her father and mother, for he was very much in love, and obtaining his failing uncle’s reluctant consent, he had married Alice as soon as he graduated, and accepted a flattering offer to teach biology in his alma mater.
They lived with his wife’s mother and father, because that was the condition on which the consent for the marriage had been given, for Alice was barely eighteen.
A wonderful, holy, happy time it was, during which heaven seemed to come down to earth and surround them, and the faith of his childhood appeared to be fulfilled through this ideal kind of living, with an exalted belief in all things eternal. Then had fallen the blow!
Sweet Alice, exquisite, perfect in all he had ever dreamed a wife could be, without a moment’s warning, slipped away into the Eternal, leaving a tiny flower of a child behind, but leaving his world dark—forever dark—without hope or God—so he felt.
He had been too stunned to take hold of life, but the sudden death of his uncle, Standish Silver, who had been more than a father to him, called him to action, and he was forced to go back to his childhood home at Silver Sands to settle up the estate, which had all been left to him.
While he was still at Silver Sands his father-in-law had written to ask if he would let them adopt the little girl as their own in place of the daughter whom they had lost. Of course he would always be welcomed as a son, but the grandfather felt he could not risk letting his wife keep the child and grow to love it tenderly if there was danger of its being torn away from them in three or four years and put under the care of a stepmother. The letter had been very gentle, but very firm, quite sensible and convincing. The young father accepted the offer without protest. In his stunned condition he did not care. He had scarcely got to know his child. He shrank from the little morsel of humanity because she seemed to his shocked senses to have been the cause of her mother’s death. It was like pressing a sore wound and opening it again. Also he loved his wife’s father and mother tenderly and felt that in a measure it was due them that he should make up in every way he could for the daughter they had lost.
So he gave his consent and the papers were signed.
Business matters held him longer than he had expected, but for a time he fully expected to return to his father-in-law’s house. A chance call, however, to a much better position in the East, which would make it possible for him to pursue interesting studies in Columbia University and fill his thoughts to the fuller exclusion of his pain, finally swayed him. He accepted the new life somewhat indifferently, almost stolidly, and went his way out of the life of his little child of whom he could not bear even to hear much.
From time to time he had sent generous gifts of money, but he had never gone back, because as the years passed he shrank even more from the scene where he had been so happy.
He had absorbed himself in his studies fiercely until his health began to suffer, and then some of his old college friends who lived in New York got hold of him and insisted that he should go out with them. Before he realized it, he was plunged into a carefree, reckless company of people who appeared to be living for the moment and having a great time out of it. It seemed to satisfy something fierce in him that had been roused by the death of Alice, and he found himself going more and more with them. For one thing, he found common ground among them in that they had cast aside the old beliefs in holy things. It gave him a sort of fierce pleasure to feel that he had identified himself with those who defied God and the Bible and went their willful way. He could not forgive God, if there was a God, for having taken away his wife, and he wanted to pay Him back by unbelief.
They were brilliant men and women, many of those with whom he had come to companion, and they kept his heart busy with their lightness and mirth, so that gradually his sorrow wore away, and he was able to shut the door upon it and take up a kind of contentment in life.
And then he met Lilla!
From the first his judgment had not approved of her. She seemed a desecration to Alice, and he stayed away deliberately from many places where he knew she was to be. But Lilla was a strong personality, as clever in her way as he, and she found that she could use Patterson Greeves to climb to social realms from which her own reckless acts had shut her out. Moreover, Patterson Greeves was attractive, with his scholarly face, his fine physique, his brilliant wit, flashing through a premature sternness that only served to make him the more distinguished. When Lilla found that he not only belonged to a fine old family dating back to Revolutionary times but had a goodly fortune in his own right, she literally laid aside every weight, and fo
r a time, almost “the sin which doth so easily beset,” and wove a net for his unsuspecting feet.
Then, all unawares, the lonely, weary, rebellious man walked into the pleasant net. He read with her for hours at a time and found himself enjoying her quaint comments, her quick wit, her little tendernesses. He suddenly realized that his first prejudice had vanished, and he was really enjoying himself in her society.
Lilla was clever. She knew her man from the start. She played to his weaknesses, she fostered his fancies, and she finally broke down one day and told him her troubles. Then somehow he found himself comforting her. From that day on matters moved rapidly. Lilla managed to make him think he was really in love with her. He wondered if perhaps after all the sun was going to shine again for him; and he put the past under lock and key and began to smile again.
He and Lilla were married soon and set up a house in New York, but almost from the start he began to be undeceived. The evenings of reading together suddenly began to openly bore her. Lilla had no notion of settling down to a domestic life. Her husband was only one of many on whom she lavished her smiles, and as soon as she had him safely she began to show her true nature: selfish, untrue, disloyal, mercenary, ambitious.
The revelation did not come all at once. Even after their child was born he still had hope of winning her to a simpler, more practical manner of life. But he found that the child was, in her eyes, only a hindrance to her ambitions and that he was not even that; and when Lilla filled his house with men and women of another world than his, whose tastes and ways were utterly distasteful to him, he began to absent himself more and more from home. This had been made possible by the growing demand for his services as lecturer and adviser in the world of science. So it came about that whenever he received an invitation of this sort he accepted it, until sometimes he would be away lecturing in universities for weeks at a time, or touring the West.