Maud Melville's Marriage

This book is always in the box that goes in my car when I move!!! It's one of those immensely touching stories that can't ever quite be forgotten. I loved Maud, and it makes it all the better to think that she's an actual person that one could have met in the old days.

Maud's mother, foreseeing troubled times for old England, allows her daughter to be married to Rupert Melville, a dear friend and neighbor of hers, when Maud is yet only a child. The king himself attends the wedding; soon after, the boy-bridegroom goes to France to finish his schooling.

Sure enough, the civil unrest erupts. It is the days of Jacobites and brother against brother. As Maud grows up, her mother dies young, and her father develops dementia. Her sister and brother-in-law take her in to their home. Continually they urge her to have her marriage annulled; in the unrest, she has not heard from Rupert in many years, and she is now a young woman, eligible to make an advantageous match.

But Maud can't believe her first love faithless, despite having been too young at the time of her marriage to even know the meaning of romantic love. He was her best friend, and she knew he was a child of God and an honorable man. Regardless of his long silence, she determined to find him. Leaving her sister's, she moves in with some family members near Newgate.

Here we see her faith in action. Despite her own sorrow, she reaches out to the wretched prisoners, freely spending her own tiny nest-egg to alleviate their suffering. She goes into the prison, with her faithful helper Gowrie, and does what she can—long before the days of such reformers as Mrs. Fry.

By this time, of course, we're fully rooting for such a courageous leading lady. But her sister and brother-in-law and an unwanted suitor begin to intrude again, and her time of freedom to search and serve is nearing an end. And, when she finally hears of Rupert, it is in the worst possible circumstances.

How will she and faithful Gowrie cope? Will her worst fears come true, or can she honestly hope for a miracle? Ah...find your own copy. You must!