New Bed-Time Stories

MY VAGRANT.

We were in pursuit of Laura’s dressmaker, and had just rung the bell at her door, when a little boy presented himself, and, standing on the lower step, uplifted a pathetic pair of blue eyes, and a small tin cup held in a little grimy hand. A large basket was on one arm; and round his neck was one of those great printed placards, such as the blind men wear who sit at the street corners. Laura’s purse was always fuller than mine; and she was extracting a bit of scrip from it, while I bent my near-sighted eyes on the boy’s label. Could it be that I read aright? I looked again. No, I was not mistaken. It read, in great, staring letters—

I HAVE LOST MY HUSBAND IN THE WAR.

In the war! And those blue eyes had not opened, surely, till some time after the war was ended! His husband! I was bewildered. I bent my gaze on him sternly, and asked, as severely as I could,—

“Young man, can you read?”

Laura was fumbling away at the unanswered door-bell. The boy looked as if he wanted to run; but I put my hand on his arm.

“Can you read?” I repeated gravely. I think he shook in his shabby boots, for his voice was not quite steady as he answered,—

“Not much.”

“Not much, I should think. Do you know what this thing says that you’ve got round your neck?”

“Does it say I’m blind?” he asked, with a little frightened quaver.

“No, it says—but do you know what a husband is?”

“Yes, he comes home drunk, and beats Mag and me awful.”

“Did you ever know a boy of your age to have a husband?”

The blue eyes grew so wide open that I wondered if they could ever shut themselves up again; and Laura, who had turned round at my question, looked as if she thought I had suddenly gone mad. The little dressmaker had opened the door, and stood there waiting meekly, with the handle in her hand. But my spirit was up, and I did not care for either of them. I asked again, very impressively, as I thought, with a pause after each word,—

“Did—you—ever—know—a—boy—of—your—age—to—have—a—husband?”

“No, marm,” he gasped, “husbands belongs to women.”

“Then what do you wear this thing for? It says that you have lost your husband in the war.”

The imp actually turned pale, and I almost pitied him.

“Will they put me in prison?” he asked, an abject little whine coming into his voice. “Will they?”

“Did you steal it?”

“I didn’t to say steal it—I just took it. I’d seen the rest put them on when they went out begging, and this was old Meg’s. She wasn’t going out to-day, and I thought no harm to borrow.”

“Then you can’t read?”

“Well, not to say read, marm. I think I could make out a word now and then.”

“Do you want to?”

The face brightened a moment, and, with the curving lips and eager eyes, was really that of a pretty boy.

“Oh, if I could!” half sighed the quivering lips; and then the smile went out, and left blank despair behind it. “It’s no use, marm; she won’t let me.”

“Who won’t? Your mother?”

“No, Mag’s mother—old Meg. My mother’s dead, and I never had any father that ever I heard of; and since mother died old Meg does for me; and every day she sends me out to beg; and if I don’t get much she whips Mag.”

I was growing strangely interested.

“Whips Mag, because you don’t get much?” I said doubtfully. “What for?”

“I guess there’s a hard place on me, marm. She found that it didn’t seem to hurt much, when she whipped me; and so one night Mag was teasing her to stop, and she turned to and whipped Mag, and that made me cry awful; and ever since, if I don’t get enough money, she whips Mag.”

“Are you sure you are telling me the truth?”

I don’t know why I asked the question, for I saw honesty in those clear eyes of his. He looked hurt. Yes, you may laugh if you want to, I’m telling you just as it was—the boy looked as hurt as any of you would if I doubted you. There came a sort of proud shame into his manner. He clutched at the placard round his neck, as if he would tear it off, and answered, sadly,—

“I s’pose I can’t expect anybody to believe me with this round my neck; but, if you would go home with me, Mag could tell you, and you would believe her.”

By this time Laura had gone in, leaving me to finish my interview alone. I reflected a moment. The other day I had heard Tom say he wanted an errand boy. Why should he not have this one? Tom was my brother. I knew just the difficulties he would make,—want of reference, a street beggar, a regular rat of the gutter. I could fancy just how he would talk. I knew, too, that I could overrule his objections. That’s a power women have when a man loves them; whether he be husband or brother or friend. I hated the thought of vice and ignorance and poverty. What if I could save just one small boy from their clutches? I said resolutely,—

“Will you go home with me, and have a comfortable home and good food and honest work, and no one ever to beat you, and learn to read?”

I had seen no assent in his eyes till I came to this last clause of my sentence. Then he asked shrewdly,—

“Who’ll teach me? I can’t go to school and do my work, too.”

“I will teach you. Will you go and work faithfully for my brother, and learn to read?”

“Won’t I, just?”

“Well, then, let me speak to the lady who went in, and I’ll take you home at once.”

He shuffled uneasily.

“If you please, marm, I can’t go till I’ve been back to Meg’s, and carried her this board.”

“But I’ll get a policeman to send a messenger with that. If you go, perhaps she won’t let you come to me.”

“Yes, marm, I shall come. But you wouldn’t believe me, sure, if I could steal away, like, and never say good-by to Mag, and let her cry both her eyes out thinking I’d been shut up, or somebody had killed me.” And his own great blue eyes grew pathetic again over this picture of sorrowful possibilities.

“Well, you may go,” I said, half reluctantly, for the little vagabond had inspired in me a singular interest. “You may go, and be sure you come to-night or in the morning, to 70 Deerham Street, and ask for Miss May.”

He looked at me with a grave, resolved look.

“I shall come,” he said; and in an instant he was gone.

That night, after dinner, I told Tom. He was mocking, incredulous, reluctant—just as I knew he would be. But it all ended in his promising to try “My Vagrant,” if he ever came.

Just as I had brought him to this pass, the bell rang, and I sprang to the dining-room door. The dining-room was the front basement, and the outside door was so near that I opened it myself. It was, indeed, my vagrant.

“I want Miss May,” he said, with the air which such a gamin puts on when he speaks to a servant,—an air which instantly subdued itself into propriety when he heard my voice.

I took him in to Tom; and I saw the blue eyes softened even the prejudiced mind and worldly heart of Mr. Thomas May. He spoke very kindly to the boy, and then sent him into the kitchen for his supper.

“Where do you propose to keep this new acquisition?” he asked me, after the blue-eyed was out of sight.

“In this house, if you please. There is a little single bed all ready for him in the attic, and I’ve arranged with cook to give him a bath and then put him into some of the clothes her own boy left behind him when he went away to sea. I mean to rescue this one soul from a starved and miserable and wicked life, and I’m willing to take some pains; and if you aren’t willing to do your part I’m ashamed of you.”

Tom laughed, and called me his “fierce little woman,” his “angry turtle-dove,” and half-a-dozen other names which he never gave me except when he was in good humor, so I knew it was all right.

Before three days were over Tom owned that my vagrant, as he persisted in calling the boy (though we knew now that his name was Johnny True), was the best errand boy he had ever employed. I myself taught him to read, as I had promised, and brighter scholar never teacher had. In four months he had progressed so fast that he could read almost any thing. There had been a sort of feverish eagerness in his desire to learn for which I was at a loss to account. Sometimes, coming home from some party or opera, I would find him studying in the kitchen at midnight.

We grew fond of him, all of us. Cook said he was no trouble, and he made it seem as if she had her own boy back again. He waited on Tom with a sort of dog-like faithfulness; and, as for me, I believe that he would have cut his hand off for me at any time.

Yet one morning he got up and deliberately walked out of the house. When his breakfast was ready cook called for him in vain, and in vain she searched for him from attic to cellar. But before it was time for Tom to go to business another boy came, a little older than my vagrant,—a nice, respectable-looking boy,—and asked for Mr. May. He came into the dining-room and stood there, cap in hand.

“If you please, sir,” he said bashfully, “Johnny True wants to know if you’ll be so good as to take me on in his place, considering that he isn’t coming back any more, and I have done errands before, and got good reference.”

He had made his little speech in breathless haste, running all his sentences together into one.

Tom looked at him deliberately, and lit a cigar.

“Johnny isn’t coming back, hey?”

“No, sir.”

“Where is Johnny gone?”

“He didn’t tell me, if you please, but he said he should be hurt to death if it troubled you to lose him, and he knew I could do as well as he could.”

I saw a refusal in Tom’s eyes, so I made haste to forestall it.

“Do take him,” I said in a low tone to Tom, and then I said to the boy that just now he had better go to the store, and Mr. May would see him presently, when he came to business.

Tom laughed, a half-amused, half-provoked laugh, when he went out, and said,—

“Well, my dear, I don’t think your vagrant has proved to be such a success that you need expect me to let him choose my next errand boy.”

“I think, at least, that if he has sent you one as good as himself you will have no fault to find,” I said hotly. But all the time there was a sore place in my own heart, for I had thought that my vagrant would have loved me too well to run away from me in this way.

That night Tom said that the new errand boy was doing well, and he had concluded to keep him on. I think Tom missed my vagrant; but not, of course, so much as I missed my bright scholar—my grateful little follower.

Of course, the new boy lived in his own home, wherever that might be. I did not concern myself about him, or feel any disposition to put him in the little bed in the front attic.

Two or three weeks passed and we heard no word from Johnny True. But at last a rainy day came, and with it Johnny, asking for Miss May.

“I guess he’s repented,” cook said, coming upstairs to tell me. I went down to Johnny, resolved to be equal to the occasion—to meet him with all the severity his ungrateful behavior deserved. But, somehow, the wistful look in his blue eyes disarmed me. He was a little thin and pale, too; and my heart began to soften even before he spoke.

“I couldn’t stay away, ma’am,” he said, with the clear accent he had caught so quickly from my brief teaching, “and not let you know why I went.”

“To let me know when you went would have been more to the purpose,” I answered, with what sternness I could command. “I had thought better of you, Johnny, than that you were capable of running away.”

“But you see, ma’am, I was afraid you would not let me go if I told you.”

“And why did you want to go? Were you not comfortable?”

“Yes, ma’am—that was the worst of it.”

“Why the worst of it? Have you any especial objection to be comfortable?”

Suddenly the blue eyes filled with tears, like a girl’s; and there was a pitiful sob in the voice which answered me.

“Oh, it hurt me so, when I was warm, and had a good supper, and everybody’s kind word, to think of poor Mag there at home, cold and hungry, and with old Meg beating her. I never should have come and left her but for the learning to read. She wanted me to come for that.”

“So you could read to her?”

“So I could teach her, ma’am. You never in all your life saw anybody so hungry to learn to read as Mag; and when I went home that first day and told her all you said, and told her that after all I couldn’t go and leave her there to take all the hard fare and hard words, she just began to cry, and to tease me to go and learn to read, so I could teach her, until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I came.”

“And how did she know she would ever see you again?” I asked. “It would have been most natural, having learned what comfort was, to stay on here and enjoy it.”

“Mag knew me, ma’am,” said my vagrant, as proudly as a prince could speak if his honor were called in question. “Mag knew what I was, and I learned as fast as I could to get back to her—don’t you think so, ma’am?”

“You learned faster than any one else could; I know that,” I answered. “But, Johnny, how could you bear to go back to begging again?”

“I couldn’t bear it, ma’am, and I didn’t. I had money enough, that Mr. Tom had given me, to buy myself a stock of papers. I’m a newsboy now, and I teach Mag to read out of the papers I have left. And old Meg knows better now than to beat Mag, and we are so much happier. It’s all owing to you; and I came back to thank you,—but I never could forsake Mag for long. I must stay with my own.”

“But they are not your own.”

“Mag is, ma’am.”

He was as resolute to ally himself, for that girl’s sake, with poverty, and, if need were, shame, as ever was a hero to live or die for the land of his birth; and out in the rain, down the desolate street, I watched my vagrant go away from me for ever. But I did not pity him. No soul is to be pitied which has reached life’s crowning good,—the power to love another better than itself. Nor do I know any curled darling of fortune who seems to me happier than was my vagrant.

HELEN’S TEMPTATION.

The sun was almost setting, but its low light came in at the western windows, and lit up a pale face lying upon the pillows, till it seemed to the watchers beside the bed as if some glory from heaven had already touched the brow of the dying. These watchers were only two,—a girl of fourteen, rather tall of her age, with gray eyes that were almost green sometimes, and dark hair, short like a boy’s, and curling all over her head; and a middle-aged woman, who had tended this girl when a baby, and was half friend, half servant, to the dying mother.

Mrs. Ash had been lying all the day, almost in silence. Her husband had brought her, a year before, to California, because she was stricken with consumption, and he hoped the change from the harsh east winds of New England to the balmy airs of the Pacific coast might restore her to health.

For a time the result had seemed to fulfil his hope; but, very suddenly, he himself had been taken ill and died; and then the half-baffled disease seized again on the mourning wife, who had now no strength to repel its onset.

I think she would fain have lived—even then, when all the joy seemed gone from her life—for her daughter Helen’s sake; but she was too weak to struggle, and so she lay there dying, quite aware of what was before her.

All day she had seemed to be thinking, thinking, and waiting till she had settled something in her own mind before she spoke. At last, with the sunset light upon her face, she beckoned to the woman, who bent nearer.

“As soon as all is over, Woods,” she said, as tranquilly as if she were speaking of the most ordinary household arrangement, “you will take Helen to my sister’s in Boston. You must make the journey by easy stages, so as not to tire her too much. Fortunately she will not be dependent. She has money enough, and she needs only care and love, which my sister will give her, I know well.

“I shall be glad if you can stay with her; but that must of course be as Mrs. Mason will arrange. You will find when my affairs are settled that you have been remembered. You will lay me by my husband’s side, and then take Helen away.

“All is arranged so that there can be no trouble, and now, if you please, leave me a little while with my daughter.”

The woman went out of the room, and then Mrs. Ash opened her arms, and Helen crept into them and lay there silently, as if she were a baby again whom her mother comforted.

She was a strange compound, this Helen Ash, of impulsiveness and self-control. She had an intense nature, and her temptations would grow chiefly out of her tendency to concentrate all her heart on a single object,—to seek whatever thing she wished for with an insistence which would not be denied.

This quality has its great advantages certainly, but it has its extreme dangers.

Helen had no brothers or sisters or special friends. She had loved only her father and mother, but she had loved them with an almost excessive devotion.

When her father died she had borne up bravely, that she might comfort and help her mother, and now she was bearing up still, that she might not sadden that parting soul with the anguish of her own.

As she lay there in her mother’s arms, her eyes were wide open and tearless, but they were full of a desperate gloom sadder than tears. She was almost as pale herself as was her mother.

“Darling,” the mother said tenderly, “how can I bear to leave you all alone? Promise me one thing only, to open your heart to new love. It would be so like you to shut yourself up in your grief, and to fancy you were loving me less if you let yourself care for your Aunt Helen.

“She will love you for my sake, and she must be your second mother now. We were dearer than most sisters to each other, and she is a wise and good woman.

“Her daughter, my namesake Laura, is just about your own age, and being her mother’s daughter, she must be worth loving. Try to care for them, my darling. The life which has no love in it is empty indeed. Will you try?”

“O mamma,” the girl cried, with a sudden, desperate sob, “I will try because you bid me! I will try; but oh, how can I love them? How can I bear to see another girl happy with her mother, and to know that you will never be with me any more—never in all the world? If I call all day and all night, you will never hear nor answer! O my own mother, must you leave me?”

“My darling, yes. I would have lived for your sake if I could. You have been my comfort always. Comfort me a little longer. Let me feel that in all the future you will try to live nobly for my sake.”

The last words had been spoken with an evident effort, and it seemed to Helen that the cheek against which her own rested was already colder than it was half an hour ago.

She clung closer to the poor wasted form that was her whole world of love, and closed her lips over the bitter cry that was rising to them; and so the two lay, very, very quietly in that last embrace they were ever to know.

And the twilight gathered round them, and at last a young moon, hanging low in the western sky, looked in and touched with its pale glory the pale faces on the pillow.

The mother stirred a little, and with a last effort clasped her child closer, and said, in a voice like a sigh, faint and sweet and strange, “Good-by, darling!” and then she seemed to sleep.

Perhaps Helen slept, also. She never quite knew; but it was an hour afterwards when Woods touched her shoulder, and said, with a kind firmness in her tone,—

“You must get up now, Miss Helen, and leave her to me. She went off just as quiet as a lamb, poor dear, and if ever a face was peaceful and happy, hers is now.”

No one knew what the few days that followed were to Helen Ash. She shut her lips, as her manner was, over her grief. She turned away, with her great tearless eyes, from the two graves where her father and mother lay side by side, and she helped, with a strange unnatural calmness, in all the preparations for the long journey she was to take.

When at last she reached her aunt’s home in Boston, this strained, unnatural composure gave way a little.

Her Aunt Helen looked so much like her mother that at first she thought she could not bear it. Then, when her aunt’s arms closed round her almost as tenderly as her mother’s would have done, she shivered a little, and burst into one wild passion of tears, which almost instantly she checked.

“I am to love you for her sake,” she said. “Those were almost her last words; and indeed, indeed, I will try, but I think I left my heart all those miles away in her grave.”

Mrs. Mason was, as her sister had said, a wise and good woman,—wise enough not to attempt to force the love or the interest of her niece. She contented herself with being exquisitely gentle and considerate towards her, and with trying, in countless little ways, to make her feel that she was at home.

Laura Mason had looked forward to Helen’s coming with a feeling that at last she was to find in her the sister she had longed for all her life, but Helen’s cold and self-contained manner disappointed her. She felt the atmosphere of Helen’s reserve almost as tangibly as if her orphan cousin had pushed her away.

The summer months passed, and scarcely brought them any nearer together. Try as Helen might, she could not get over the sting of pain when she saw this other girl happy in her mother’s love, or running gayly to meet her father when he came home at night. They had each other, she used to say to herself, but she had only her dead. She had not even Woods to speak to, for Mrs. Mason had decided not to retain her; and since there was no one to whom Helen ever spoke of the past, she pondered it all the more in her heart.

Things were a little better when school commenced in the autumn. Helen and Laura were in the same classes, and that brought them somewhat more together; still there was no real intimacy between them.

In the spring there was to be a competitive examination, and a medal was to be bestowed on the leading scholar in the class. By midwinter it was quite evident that Helen and Laura led all the rest, and a real spirit of rivalry grew up between the cousins which bade fair to become a passion.

Mrs. Mason looked on regretfully, adhering to her difficult policy of non-interference. One day Helen heard Laura say to her mother,—

“Mamsie, dear, you know you have the key to that French method locked up in your desk, for you taught us from it last summer. Won’t you be a dear, and lend it to me for a little while?

“If I only could have that to help me, I should be sure of success. I would study just as hard. It would only be the difference between knowing when one was right, and floundering on in an awful uncertainty.”

Helen was behind the curtain of the library window, and evidently they did not know of her presence. She waited for her aunt’s answer. If Laura had the key, then, indeed, she would be sure of success.

Mrs. Mason spoke in a sad voice, with a subtile little thrill of reproach in it.

“I did not think you would so much as wish, my dear, to do any thing that was not quite open and straightforward. You know Mademoiselle does not expect you to see the key. The very test of your power is that you should work without its aid, and the examination will prove how far you have succeeded.”

“I suppose there’s no use in coaxing, when you say that. I do wish you weren’t such an uncoaxable mamma.”

“No, you don’t,—you only fancy that you wish it; but, in your inmost soul, you would rather have me as I am,” Mrs. Mason answered; and Helen heard the sound of a kiss, and felt, for the thousandth time, how bitter it was that this other girl should have home and mother, while she had only a far-off grave.

But, at least, she would triumph in this school contest! If Laura came off best there, it would be more than she could bear.

The weeks passed on, and the spring came. The deep old garden back of the house—the garden Helen’s mother had played in when she was a child—grew full of bird-songs and blossoms.

There was a sweet laughter on the face of nature. The springs bubbled with it; the flowers opened to the light; the sunshine poured down its tender warmth, and the soft coo and call of the birds gave voice to the general joy.

But both Laura and Helen were too eager and too tired to be gay. They only studied. They went to sleep with books under their pillows; they woke with the first light, and began to study again.

It was the very week of the examination, at last. Helen felt satisfied with herself in all but her French. If she could only have that key for one little half-hour, she knew she would have no weak spot in her armor.

She brooded over the idea until the temptation possessed her like an evil fate. In her passionate girl’s heart she said to herself that she wanted to die if Laura triumphed over her at school. Laura had every thing else; why should she have that, also?

She had said at first, “If only it were right to have the key!” Then she said, “if only she could chance on the key, somehow!” Then, “if only she could get at her aunt’s desk and find the key!” At last it was,—

“I will get at the key, somehow!”

This last was the very morning before the examination. She rose from her bed in the dainty blue-hung room her aunt had taken such pains to make pretty for her, and went softly downstairs, in the young spring morning.

Her bare feet made no sound on the thick stair-carpet. She looked like a little white-clad ghost that had forgotten to flee away at the first cock-crowing, as an orthodox ghost ought; but no ghost ever had such glowing cheeks, crimson with excitement, such great wide-opened gray eyes with green depths in them.

She held in her hand a large bunch of keys belonging to her mother. It was just a chance whether one of them would fit her aunt’s desk.

She fairly trembled with excitement. She had lost all thought of the wrong she was doing—of the shame and meanness of this act, which must be done in silence and mystery; she thought only of the triumph which success would mean.

She stood before the desk, and tried key after key with her shaking fingers.

At last one fitted. In a moment more the key to the French method was in her hand.

In desperate haste she compared her own work with it, and made corrections here and there.

She was so absorbed that she quite failed to see another white-clad figure which had followed her noiselessly down the stairs, and stood in the doorway long enough to see what she was doing, and then went away.

Hurriedly Helen went through her evil task, and then stole back to bed, with her glittering eyes and burning cheeks.

Meantime Laura had gone, full of excitement, to her mother. Mr. Mason was away on business, and Laura crept into the empty half of her mother’s great bed.

“Mamsie,” she said, “wake up quickly, and listen.”

Patient Mrs. Mason rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and turned over. Then followed Laura’s breathless story.

“Of course she’ll win, now,” Laura said, in conclusion, “unless I tell Mademoiselle what she has done; and I suppose you wouldn’t like that, would you, mamsie?

“But it was her French that was the shakiest of any thing. Oh, did you ever see any thing quite so mean? Think of getting into your desk with her keys, and then slying off all those corrections!”

“Yes, I do think,” Mrs. Mason answered, with almost a groan.

“And she is Laura’s child—my poor Laura, who was honor and honesty itself!

“You don’t know, dear, what a bitter thing this is to me. Poor Laura! what if she knows?”

“But what shall we do, mamsie, dear? Are we just to keep still, and let her win the medal, and let every one think she has beaten fairly, or will you tell her what we know?”

“Will you go away now,” Mrs. Mason said, “and come back again before breakfast? I don’t want to say any thing until I am quite sure what it is best to do.”

When Laura came again, Mrs. Mason had settled upon her course of action, or rather of inaction.

“Don’t be vexed, girlie,” she said to Laura; “I know it will seem hard to you to be beaten unfairly; but there are things of more consequence even than that. The thing that seems to me most important, just now, is to know what Helen’s character really is. If she is not utterly unworthy of her mother, she will repent before the thing comes to an end. If she does not, it will be time enough to think what to do next.”

“And I must let her beat unfairly, and never say one word?” Laura asked, with a little strain of rebellion in her voice.

“Yes, if you are the obedient and generous Laura I like to believe you.”

“Mamsie, you have a flattering tongue, and you always get your way.”

“And who is pretty sure always to admit, in the end, that it was the best way?” asked Mrs. Mason, laughing.

“Mamsie, you are getting spoiled. See if I say yours was the best way this time!”

French came on the first of the two examination-days. Laura and Helen led their class. Laura did very well, but Helen acquitted herself triumphantly, and sat down amid a little buzz of congratulations and praises.

But somehow the triumph left a bitter taste in her mouth. She did not look at Laura, and even if she had she would not have understood the scorn on Laura’s face, since she was quite unaware that her raid on her aunt’s desk had been observed.

Still she was not happy. She needed no scorn from outside, she had already begun to feel such bitterness of self-contempt scorching her soul. It seemed to her that up to this moment she had been as one under an evil spell.

She had thought of no single thing except her triumph over her cousin—quite careless as to the means to this hotly desired end. Now she began to realize how base those means had been, and to long to exchange her success for any direst possible failure.

Mrs. Mason was watching her, and when they started to go home, she found an instant in which to whisper to Laura,—

“Be gentle to her, girlie; she will suffer enough to-night.”

At supper Helen’s place was vacant. She sent word that her head ached too much to come.

Her aunt despatched to her room tea and strawberries and bread-and-butter enough for the hungriest of girls, and then left her to herself.

The poor, lonesome, miserable girl lay upon her bed and thought. It was not quite a year since she had lain in her mother’s arms and heard her say,—

“Try to live nobly for my sake.”

Those had been almost her mother’s last words; after them there was only the low sigh, faint as if it came already from far-off worlds,—

“Good-by, darling.”

The low sun-rays stole in softly, and touched her sad, pale face, and then went away; and after a while some cold, far-off stars looked down into the window, and saw the girl lying there still, fighting her battle with herself.

One thing her conscience told her,—that she must undo this wrong, at whatever cost of shame.

Once she started up, half-resolved to go to her aunt and tell her the whole story, and seek her help and counsel. But she lay down again, without the courage to confess her shame.

Through the long night she scarcely slept; but before morning she had resolved what to do. In public she had taken the wages of her sin; in public she would make atonement, and eat the bitter bread of humiliation.

When she had once settled on her course of action, sleep touched her weary eyes, and soothed her into a forgetfulness from which only the breakfast-bell awoke her.

That day every one noticed a singular calmness and resolve in her manner. She passed the remaining examinations with thorough success, yet with an evident lack of interest in their result which all save her aunt were at a loss to understand.

At last the time came for the awarding of the medal. There was a little consultation among the examining committee, and then their chairman rose, with the medal in his hand.

“To Miss Helen Ash,” he began; but before he could proceed farther, Miss Helen Ash herself interrupted him.

Her face was as white as the dress she wore, and her eyes glittered with some strange fire of resolve or courage; but her voice was absolutely without a quiver of emotion in it, as steady and even as if she were beyond hope or fear.

“The medal does not belong to me,” she said. “My success was a false success. I dishonestly found the key to the French method, and corrected my mistakes by it, or I should have failed. The prize belongs, of right, to my cousin, Laura Mason.”

The chairman was a fussy little man, and was thoroughly discomposed by this interruption. He had had his little speech all ready, but it began with the name of Helen Ash, and he found it difficult to change it at a moment’s notice.

“Bless my heart!” he said quite unconsciously, and looking helplessly around him, he repeated, “Bless my heart!”

“Miss Laura Mason,” suggested one of his brethren on the committee; and thus reinforced, he began again,—

“Miss Laura Mason, I am very sorry—I mean I am very glad, to bestow on you this medal, which you have fairly earned by your success.”

And then he sat down, and his confusion was covered by a gentle little clapping of hands.

That night Mrs. Mason went to Helen in her own room, when the twilight shadows were falling, and as she entered the door she said, “My darling,” in a voice so like Helen’s mother’s that the girl’s very heart sprang to meet it.

“My darling, I know now that you are true enough and brave enough to be my sister’s child.”

But Helen shrank back into the darkness, and this time the voice was broken with tears which faltered,—

“Is there any one who could know what I have done, and yet not despise me?”

“There is no one, dear, who dares to scorn the soul that repents and atones.”

And then loving arms held the poor lonesome girl close, and she knew that she was no longer alone. She had found a new home—the home her mother bade her seek—in the heart of that mother’s sister.

THE SURGEON OF THE DOLLS’ HOSPITAL.

It was nearly four years ago that I first noticed, in one of the quiet side-streets in the West Central district of London, a sign over a door on which I read:—

DOLLS’ HOSPITAL.

Operations from 9 A.M., to 4 P.M.

Whenever I passed through the street—and that was often, for it was a short cut to Mudie’s,—the largest circulating library in the world,—I used to notice this quaint sign, and wonder, laughingly, who was the superintending physician to this place of healing for the numerous race of dolls.

I often thought I would go in and see the establishment; but one is always busy in London, so, very likely, I should never have entered its door but for a casualty at my own fireside.

When I went downstairs one morning, I heard a sound of weeping, as bitter as that of Rachel of old mourning for her children. The mourner in this case was Mistress Brown-Eyes, as I was wont to call my friend’s little girl.

She was a pretty child, this little Milicent; but you forgot to think about the rest of her face when you saw her wonderful eyes—soft and clear, yet bright, and of the warmest, deepest, yet softest brown. She had made her home in my heart, and so her grief, whatever it was, appealed at once to my sympathies.

“My darling,” I said, as I tried to draw away the little hands from before the sorrowful face, “what can be the matter?”

“Bella is dead!” and the sobs recommenced with fresh violence.

Bella was the best-beloved of a somewhat large family of dolls,—a pretty Parian creature, with blue eyes and fair hair. I had myself lately assisted in making a trunk of clothes for Bella; and I grudged sorely all my wasted labor, if she had come to an untimely end.

I looked at the dear remains, stretched out sadly upon a chair. Bella was evidently very dead indeed. Her pretty neck was broken, her fair, foolish head lay quite severed from her silken-clad body. Suddenly there flashed into my mind the thought of the dolls’ hospital. I spoke cheerfully.

“Brown-Eyes,” I said, “I think that Bella may recover. I am pretty sure that her collar-bone is broken; but I have heard of people who got well after breaking their collar-bones.”

The child looked up, her eyes shining through tears, and said, with that air of grave, old-fashioned propriety which was one of the most amusing things about her,—

“It is a very serious accident. Do you think Bella could recover?”

“I hope she may; and I shall at once take her to the hospital.”

“The hospital!” cried Mistress Brown-Eyes; “but that is where Mary Ann went when she had a fever. She was gone six weeks. Will my Bella be gone six weeks?”

“I think not so long as one week, if she can be cured at all.”

In five minutes more I was in the street, with Bella in a basket on my arm. Her little mother had covered her carefully from the cold, though it was already May; and I felt as if I were in a position of grave responsibility as I hurried to the dolls’ hospital.

A bell rang when I opened the door, and the oddest little person stood before me. At first I thought it was a child masquerading in long clothes; for she was not more than half the height of an ordinary woman.

But, looking more closely, I saw the maturity of her face, and realized that I stood in the presence of a grown-up dwarf, who might really have been taken for Dickens’s Miss Mowcher, herself.

She was dressed in a long, straight gown of rusty-looking black alpaca, and her rusty-looking black hair was drawn straightly back from as plain a face as one often sees. It was a kind, honest face, however, and I liked the voice in which she asked how she could serve me. I explained my errand.

“Please to let me see the patient.”

She spoke with as much gravity as if she had been the superintending physician of the largest hospital in London. I unveiled poor Bella, and the dwarf lifted her from the basket with grave tenderness.

“Poor little beauty!” she said. “Yes’m, I think I can cure her.”

“Will the operation take long?” I asked, humoring her fancy.

“I should prefer that the patient should not be moved, ma’am, before to-morrow.”

“Very well; then I will leave her.”

Just at that moment I heard a voice call, “Sally! Sally!”

It was a well-trained, ladylike voice, but somewhat imperious.

“Yes, Lady Jane, I’ll be there in a moment,” answered the dwarf, whom I now knew to be Sally. Then a door opened, and the most beautiful creature I ever saw stood in it, looking in.

The hospital was a bare enough place. There was a great table covered with dolls,—dolls with broken legs, dolls with punched heads, dolls with one arm gone, hairless dolls, broken-backed dolls, dolls of every kind, awaiting the ministrations of Sally; and dozens of other dolls were there, too, whom those skilful fingers had already cured of their wounds.

There was a shelf, on which was ranged the pharmacy of this hospital,—white cement, boxes of saw-dust, collections of legs and arms, wigs, every thing, in short, that an afflicted doll could possibly require. Then there were two or three wooden stools, and these completed the furniture of the apartment.

Standing in the doorway, Lady Jane looked as if she were a larger doll than the rest,—a doll with a soul. She seemed a lady’s child, every pretty inch of her. I should think she was about twelve years old. She wore a blue dress, and a blue ribbon in the bright, fair hair that hung all about her soft, pink-and-white face, out of which looked two great, serious, inquiring blue eyes.

“I will be through soon, Lady Jane,” Sally said quietly; and the girl turned away, but not before I had taken in a complete picture of her loveliness, and had noticed also a somewhat singular ornament she wore, attached to a slender golden chain. It was so strange a vision to see in this humble little shop that my curiosity got the better of me, and, after the door had closed on Lady Jane, I asked, “Does she live here?”

“Yes’m,” answered Sally proudly. “In a way, she is my child.”

I hesitated to inquire further; but I think my eyes must have asked some questions in spite of myself; for Sally said, after a moment,—

“You seem interested, ma’am, and I don’t mind telling you about her. I saw Lady Jane first some eight years ago. A man had her who used to go round with a hand-organ. She was such a pretty little creature that everybody gave her money, and she was a great profit to Jacopo, for that was his name.

“It used to make my heart ache to see the little beauty trudging round all day on her patient feet. When Jacopo spoke to her, I’ve seen her turn pale; and she never used to smile except when she was holding out her bit of a hat to people for money. She had to smile then; it was part of the business.

“I was sixteen, and I was all alone in the world. I had a room to myself, and I worked days in a toy-shop. I used to dress the dolls, and I got very clever at mending them; but I hadn’t thought of the hospital, then.

“I lived in the same street with Jacopo, and I grew very fond of the little lady, as the people in the street used to call Jane. Sometimes I coaxed Jacopo to let her stay with me at night; but after three or four times, he would not let her come again. I suppose he thought she would get too fond of me.

“Things went on that way for two years; then one night, in the middle of the night, a boy came for me, and said Jacopo was dying and wanted me to come. I knew it was something about Jane, and I hurried on my clothes and went.

“The child was asleep in one corner. She had been tramping all that day, as usual, and she was too tired out for the noise in the room to wake her. Jacopo looked very ill, and he could hardly summon strength to speak to me.

“‘The end has come sudden, Sally,’ he said, ‘the end to a bad life. But I ain’t bad enough to want harm to happen to the little one when I am gone. There will be plenty of folks after her, for she’s a profitable little one to have; but if you want her, I’ll give her to you. You may take her away to-night, if you will.’

“‘Indeed I will,’ I cried, ‘and thank you. While I can work, she shall never want.’

“Jacopo had been fumbling under his pillow as he spoke; and when I said I would take the child he handed me a curious locket. Maybe you noticed it at her neck when she stood in the door?

“He said, as nearly as I could understand, for it was getting hard work for him to speak, that he had stolen the child, but he had always kept this thing, which she had on her neck when he took her, and perhaps it would help, some day, to find her people.

“So I took her home. The next morning I heard that Jacopo was dead, and the Lady Jane has been mine ever since.”

“Have you always called her Lady Jane?” I asked.

“Yes’m. There is a coronet on that locket she wears; and I know she must be some great person’s daughter, she is so beautiful, and seems so much like a real lady.”

“And so you’ve struggled on and worked for her, and taken care of her for six years, now?”

“Yes’m, and I’ve thanked God every day that I’ve had her to take care of. You see, ma’am, I’m not like other people; and it was a good fortune I couldn’t look for to have a beautiful child like that given into my arms, as you might say. It was all the difference between being alone and with no one to care for, and having a home and an interest in life like other women.

“I gave up working in the shop when I took her, for I didn’t like to leave her alone. I was a good workwoman, and they let me take work home for awhile; then I opened the hospital, and I’ve done very well. Lady Jane has been to school, and I don’t think if her true parents met her, they would be ashamed of her.”

“Do you ever think,” I said, “that they may meet her some time, and then you would lose her for ever?”

“Yes, indeed, I think about that, ma’am; and I make her keep the locket in sight all the time, in hopes it might lead to something.”

“In hopes!” I said, surprised. “You don’t want to part with her, do you?”

I was sorry, instantly, that I had asked the question, for her poor face flushed, and the tears gathered in her eyes.

“O ma’am,” she said, “if I stopped to think about myself, I suppose I should rather die than lose her; but I don’t think of any thing but her. And how could I want her, a lady born, and beautiful as any princess, to live always in a little room back of a dolls’ hospital? Would it be right for me to want it?

“No; I think God gave her to make a few of my years bright; and when the time comes, she will go away to live her own life, and I shall live out mine, remembering that she was here, once; and harking back till I can hear the sound of her voice again; or looking till I see her bright head shine in the corner where she sits now.”

Just then the bell rang, and other customers came into the hospital, and I went away, promising to return for Bella on the morrow.

I walked through the streets with a sense that I had been talking with some one nobler than the rest of the world. Another than poor Sally might have adopted Lady Jane, perhaps, tended her, loved her; but who else would have been noble enough to love her, and yet be ready to lose her for ever and live on in darkness quite satisfied if but the little queen might come to her own again?

I comforted Mistress Brown-Eyes with a promise of her “child’s” recovery, and I went to a kettle-drum or two in the afternoon, and dined out at night; but all the time, amidst whatever buzz of talk, I was comparing the most generous persons I had ever known with the poor dwarfed surgeon of the dolls’ hospital, and finding them all wanting.

I went for Bella about four the next afternoon. I wanted to get to the hospital late enough to see something of the little surgeon and her beautiful ward. I purchased a bunch of roses on the way, for I meant to please Sally by giving them to Lady Jane.

I opened the door, and again, at the ringing of the bell, the quaint little figure of the dwarf surgeon started up like Jack-in-the-box.

“Is the patient recovered?” I asked.

“The patient is quite well;” and the surgeon took down pretty Bella, and proudly exhibited her. The white cement had done its work so perfectly that the slender neck showed no signs of ever having been broken.

I paid the surgeon her modest fee, and then I said, “Here are some roses I brought for Lady Jane.”

Sally’s plain face beamed with pleasure. “It’s time to stop receiving patients for to-day,” she said. “Won’t you walk into the sitting-room and give the roses to Lady Jane, yourself?”

I was well pleased to accept the invitation. The sitting-room was as cosy as the hospital itself was barren of attraction. I really wondered at the taste with which it was arranged. The hangings were blue, and two or three low chairs were covered with the same color; and there were pretty trifles here and there which made it seem like a lady’s room.

My roses were received with a cry of delight.—Page 69.

My roses were received with a cry of delight; and, while Lady Jane put them in a delicate glass, Sally made me sit down in the most comfortable chair, and then she asked her ward to sing to me.

The girl had a wonderful voice, soft and clear and full.

When she had done singing, Sally said, “I have thought sometimes that, if no better fortune comes, Lady Jane can sing herself into good luck.”

“I count on something better than that,” the little lady cried carelessly. “When I ‘come to my own,’ like the princesses in all the fairy tales, I’ll send you my picture, Sally, and it will make you less trouble than I do. It won’t wear out its gowns, nor want all the strawberries for supper.”

Sally didn’t answer; but two great tears gathered in her eyes, and rolled down her cheeks.

Lady Jane laughed—not unkindly, only childishly—and said, “Never mind. Don’t cry yet. You’ll have time enough for that when it all comes to pass. And you know you want it to happen; you always say so.”

“Yes, yes, dear, I want it to happen,” Sally said hastily; “I couldn’t want to shut you up here for ever, like a flower growing in a dungeon.”

“A pretty, blue-hung dungeon, with nice soft chairs,” Lady Jane said pleasantly; and then I got up to go.

Had this beautiful girl any real heart behind her beauty? I wondered. If the time ever came when Sally must give her up to some brighter fate, would it cost the little lady herself one pang? Could she be wholly insensible to all the devotion that had been lavished on her for all these years? I could not tell; but she seemed to me too light a thing for deep loving.

I carried Bella home to Mistress Brown-Eyes, who received her with great joy, and with a certain tender respect, such as we give to those who have passed through perils. I stayed in London till “the season” was over,—that is to say, till the end of July; and then, with the last rose of summer in my buttonhole, I went over to the fair sea coast of France.

It was not until the next May that I found myself in London again; and going to renew my subscription at Mudie’s, passed the dolls’ hospital. I looked up at the quaint sign, and the fancy seized me to go in.

I opened the door, and promptly as ever, the dwarf surgeon of the dolls stood before me. It was nearly four o’clock, and the hospital was empty of customers. Nothing in it was changed except the face of the surgeon. Out of that always plain face a certain cheerful light had faded. It looked now like a face accustomed to tears. I said,—

“Do you remember me, Dr. Sally?”

A sort of frozen smile came to the poor trembling lips.

“Oh, yes’m. You’re the lady that brought the rose-buds to Lady Jane.”

“And is she well?” I asked.

“I think so, ma’am. Heaven knows I hope so; but the old days when I knew are over. Won’t you come into the sitting-room, please?”

I wanted nothing better for myself, and I felt that it might ease her sad heart to break its silence; so I followed her into the familiar room. It, at least, was unchanged. The blue hangings were there, and the low easy-chairs, and the pretty trifles; and yet, somehow, the room seemed cold, for the beauty which had gladdened it last year had gone for ever.

“Will you tell me what happened?” I asked; and I know the real sympathy I felt must have sounded in my voice.

“It wasn’t long after you were here,” she said, “a lady was driving by, and she saw my sign. She sent her footman to the door to see if the place was really what that said; and the next day she came in herself and brought a whole load of broken toys. She said she wanted these things put in order to take into the country, for they were favorite playthings of her little girl’s.

“I turned then and looked at the child who had come in with her mother. I can never tell you how I felt. It was as though Lady Jane had gone back six years. Just what my darling was when she came to me, this little girl was now,—the very same blue eyes, and bright, fair hair, and the pretty, pink-and-white face.

“Just at that moment, Lady Jane came into the hospital, and when the lady saw her, she stood and gazed as if she had seen a ghost. I looked at the lady herself, and then I looked at Lady Jane, and then again at the little girl; and true as you live, ma’am, I knew it was Lady Jane’s mother and sister before ever a word was spoken. I felt my knees shaking under me, and I held fast to the counter to keep from falling. I couldn’t have spoken first, if my life had depended on it.

“The lady looked, for what seemed to me a long time; and then she walked up to my darling and touched the locket that she wore on her neck. At last she turned to me and asked, with a little sternness in her gentle voice, if I would tell her who this girl was, and how I came by her.

“So I told her the whole story, just as I had told it to you, and before I had finished, she was crying as if her heart would break. Down she went on her knees beside Lady Jane, and put her arms around her, and cried,—

“‘O my darling, my love, I thought you were dead! I am your mother—oh, believe me, my darling! Love me a little, a little,—after all these years!’

“And just as properly as if she had gone through it all in her mind a hundred times beforehand, Lady Jane answered,—

“‘I always expected you, mamma.’

“Somehow, the lady looked astonished. She grew quieter, and stood up, holding Lady Jane’s hand.

“‘You expected me?’ she said, inquiringly.

“‘Yes, you know I knew I had been stolen; and I used to think and think, and fancy how my true mother would look, and what my right home would be; and I always felt sure in my heart that you would come some day. I didn’t know when or how it would be; but I expected you.’

“‘And when will you be ready to go with me?’ asked the mother.

“‘When you please, mamma.’

“The lady hesitated, and turned to me. ‘I owe you so much,’ she said, ‘so much that I can never hope to pay it; and I do not like to grieve you. But her father and I have been without Jane so long, could you spare her to me at once?’

“‘That must be as you and she say, ma’am,’ I answered, trying as hard as I could to speak quietly. ‘I never have wanted any thing but that she should be well off and happy so far, and won’t begin to stand in her light now.’

“Then the lady turned to the little girl who had come in with her. ‘Ethel,’ she said, ‘this is your sister. She has been lost to us eight years, but we will keep her always, now.’ And then, with more thanks to me, she started to go away,—the stately, beautiful lady, with her beautiful girls, one on each side of her.

“They got to the door, and suddenly my darling turned,—O ma’am, it’s the best thing in my whole life to remember that! Of her own accord she turned and came back to me, and said she,—

“‘Don’t think, Sally, that I’m not sorry to say good-by. Of course I can’t be sorry to find my own mamma and my right home, but I’m sorry to leave you.’

“And then she put her arms round my neck and kissed me just as she had done when I took her home that night from Jacopo’s, six years before; and then she went away, and the sunshine, it seemed to me, went out of the door with her, and has never come back since.”

The poor little surgeon of the dolls stopped speaking, and cried very quietly, as those cry who are not used to have their tears wiped away, or their sorrows comforted.

I wanted to say that Lady Jane seemed to me a heartless little piece, who cared for nothing in the world but herself, and wasn’t worth grieving for; but I felt there would be no comfort for her in thinking that there had never been any thing worth having in her life. Far better let her go on believing that for six years she had sheltered an angel at her fireside.

At last, when I saw her tears were ceasing to flow, I said, “And when did you see her again?”

“Oh, I have never seen her since that day. I think she pitied me too much to come back and give me the sorrow of parting with her over again. No, I have never seen her, but her mother sent me five hundred pounds.”

“And so she ought,” I said impulsively. “It was little enough for all you had done.”

Surgeon Sally looked at me with wonder, not unmixed with reproach, in her eyes.

“Do you think I wanted that?” she asked. “I had had my pay for all I did, ten times over, in just having her here to look at and to love. No; I sent the money back, and I think it must be that my darling understood; for, two months afterwards, I received the only gift I would have cared to have,—her portrait. Will you please to look round, ma’am? It hangs behind you.”

I looked round, and there she was, even lovelier than when I had seen her first,—a bright, smiling creature, silken-clad, patrician to the finger-tips. But it seemed to me that no heart of love looked out of the fair, careless face. I thought I would rather be Surgeon Sally, and know the sweetness of loving another better than myself.

“She is very beautiful,” I said, as I turned away.

“Yes; and sometimes I almost think I feel her lips, her bonny bright lips, touch my face, as they did that last day, and hear her say, ‘Don’t think, Sally, that I’m not sorry.’ Oh, my lot isn’t hard, ma’am. I might have lived my life through and never have known what it was to have something all my own to love. God was good.

“And after all, ma’am,” she added cheerfully, “there’s nothing happier in the world than to give all the pleasure you can to somebody.”

And I went away, feeling that the dwarf surgeon of the dolls’ hospital had learned the true secret of life.

PRETTY MISS KATE.

Everybody called her “pretty Miss Kate.” It was an odd title, and she had come by it in an odd way. A sort of half-witted nurse, whose one supreme merit was her faithfulness, had tended Squire Oswald’s baby daughter all through her early years; and she it was who had first called the girl “pretty Miss Kate.”

It was a small neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else; and, by dint of much hearing this title, all the neighbors grew to use it. And, indeed, at fifteen Kate Oswald deserved it. She was a tall, slight girl, with a figure very graceful, and what people call stylish.

She had blue eyes; not the meaningless blue of a French doll, but deep and lustrous, like the tender hue of the summer sky. She had hair like some Northland princess. It had not a tint of yellow in it, but it was fine and fair, and so light as to be noticeable anywhere. Her skin was exquisite, too, as skin needs must be to match such hair. When any color came to the cheeks it was never crimson, but just the faintest tint of the blush rose; her lips alone were of rich, vivid bloom. A prettier creature, truly, seldom crosses this planet; and the few such girls who have lived among us, and grown to womanhood, have made wild work generally, using hearts for playthings; and, like other children, breaking their toys now and then. But pretty Miss Kate was not at the age yet for that sort of pastime, and her most ardent worshipper was little Sally Green.

There was a curious friendship between these two, if one may call that friendship which is made up of blind worship on one side and gentle pity and kindliness on the other.

Squire Oswald owned the poor little house where Widow Green lived, and whenever there was an unusual press of work at the great house above, the family washing used to be sent down to Mrs. Green at the foot of the hill. Many an hour the widow worked busily, fluting the delicate ruffles and smoothing the soft muslins, out of which pretty Miss Kate used to bloom as a flower does out of its calyx. And on these occasions Sally used to carry the dainty washing home, and she nearly always contrived to be permitted to take it up to Miss Kate’s room, herself.

Nobody thought much about little Sally Green any way,—least of all did any one suspect her of any romantic or heroic or poetical qualities. And yet she had them all; and if you came to a question of soul and mind, there was something in Sally which entitled her to rank with the best. She was a plain, dark little thing, with a stubbed, solid, squarely-built figure; with great black eyes, which nobody thought any thing about in her, but which would have been enough for the whole stock-in-trade of a fashionable belle; with masses of black hair that she did not know what to do with; and with a skin somewhat sallow, but smooth. No one ever thought how she looked, except, perhaps, pretty Miss Kate.

One day, when the child brought home the washing, Kate had been reading aloud to a friend, and Sally had shown an evident inclination to linger. At that time Kate was not more than fourteen, and the interest or the admiration in Sally’s face struck her, and, moved by a girl’s quick impulse, she had said,—

“Do you want to hear all of it, Sally? Wait, then, and I will read it to you.”

The poem was Mrs. Browning’s “Romance of the Swan’s Nest,” and it was the first glimpse for Sally Green into the enchanted land of poetry and fiction. Before that she had admired pretty Miss Kate, but now the feeling grew to worship.

Kate was not slow to perceive it, with that feminine instinct which somehow scents out and delights in the honest admiration of high or low, rich or poor. She grew very kind to little Sally. Many a book and magazine she lent the child; and now and then she gave her a flower, a bit of bright ribbon, or some little picture. To poor Sally Green these trifles were as the gifts of a goddess, and no devotee ever treasured relics from the shrine of his patron saint more tenderly than she cherished any, even the slightest, token which was associated with the beautiful young lady whom she adored with all her faithful, reverent, imaginative heart.

One June evening Sally had been working hard all day. She had washed dishes, run her mother’s errands, got supper, and now her reward was to come.

“You may make yourself tidy,” her mother said, “and carry home that basket of Miss Kate’s things to Squire Oswald’s.”

Sally flew upstairs, and brushed back her black locks, and tied them with a red ribbon Miss Kate had given her. She put on a clean dress, and a little straw hat that last year had been Miss Kate’s own; and really for such a stubbed, dark little thing, she looked very nicely. She was thirteen—two years younger than her idol—and while Miss Kate was tall, and looked older than her years, Sally looked even younger than she was. Her heart beat as she hurried up the hill. She thought of the fable of the mouse and the lion, which she had read in one of the books Miss Kate had lent her. It made her think of herself and her idol. Not that Miss Kate was like a lion at all,—no, she was like a beautiful princess,—but she herself was such a poor, humble, helpless little mouse; and yet there might be a time, if she only watched and waited, when she, even she, could do pretty Miss Kate some good. And if the time ever came, wouldn’t she do it, just, at no matter what cost to herself? Poor little Sally! The time was on its way, and nearer than she thought.

She found Miss Kate in her own pretty room,—a room all blue and white and silver, as befitted such a fair-haired beauty. The bedstead and wardrobe were of polished chestnut, lightly and gracefully carved. The carpet was pale gray, with impossible blue roses. The blue chintz curtains were looped back with silver cords; there were silver frames, with narrow blue edges, to the few graceful pictures; and on the mantel were a clock and vases with silver ornaments.

Pretty Miss Kate looked as if she had been dressed on purpose to stay in that room. She wore a blue dress, and round her neck was a silver necklace which her father had brought her last year from far-off Genoa. Silver ornaments were in her little ears, and a silver clasp fastened the belt at her waist. She welcomed Sally with a sweet graciousness, a little conscious, perhaps, of the fact that she was Miss Oswald, and Sally was Sally Green; but to the child her manner, like every thing else about her, seemed perfection.

“Sit down and stay a little, Sally,” she said, “I have something to tell you. Do you remember what you heard me read that first time, when your eyes got so big with listening, and I made you stay and hear it all?”

“Yes, indeed,” Sally cried eagerly. “I never forgot any thing I ever heard you read. That first time it was ‘The Romance of the Swan’s Nest.’”

“Yes, you are right, and I know I was surprised to find how much you cared about it. I began to be interested in you then, for you know I am interested in you, don’t you, Sally?”

Sally blushed with pleasure till her face glowed like the June roses in Miss Kate’s silver vases, but she did not know what to say, and so, very wisely, she did not say any thing. Miss Kate went on,—

“Well, that very same poem I am going to read, next Wednesday night, at the evening exercises in the academy. The academy hall won’t hold everybody, and so they are going to be admitted by tickets. Each of us girls has a certain number to give away, and I have one for you. I thought you would like to go and see me there among the rest in my white gown, and hear me read the old verses again.”

You would not have believed so small a thing could so have moved anybody; but Sally’s face turned from red to white, and from white to red again, and her big black eyes were as full of tears as an April cloud is of rain-drops.

“Do you mean it, truly?” she asked.

“Yes, truly, child. Here is your ticket. Why, don’t cry, foolish girl. It’s nothing. I wanted to be sure of one person there who would think I read well, whether any one else did or not. And I’ve a gown for you, too—that pink muslin, don’t you know, that I wore last year? I’ve shot up right out of it, and it’s of no use to me, now, and mamma said I might give it to you. This is Saturday; you can get it ready by Wednesday, can’t you?”

What a happy girl went home that night, just as the rosy June sunset was fading away, and ran, bright and glad and full of joyful expectation, into the Widow Green’s humble little house! Widow Green wasn’t much of a woman, in the neighbors’ estimation. She was honest and civil, and she washed well; but that was all they saw in her. Sally saw much more. She saw a mother who always tried to make her happy; who shared her enthusiasms, or at least sympathized with them; who was never cross or jealous, or any thing but motherly. She was as pleased, now, at the prospect of Sally’s pleasure as Sally herself was; and just as proud of this attention from pretty Miss Kate. Together they made over the pink muslin dress; and when Wednesday night came the widow felt sure that her daughter was as well worth having, and as much to be proud of, as any other mother’s daughter that would be at the academy.

“You must go very early,” she said, “to get a good seat; and you need not be afraid to go right up to the front. You’ve just as good right to get close up there as anybody.”

When Sally was going out, her mother called her back.

“Here, dear,” she said, “just take the shawl. Do it to please me, for there’s no knowing how cold it might be when you get out.”

“The shawl” was an immense Rob Roy plaid,—a ridiculous wrap, truly, for a June night; but summer shawls they had none, and Sally was too dutiful, as well as too happy, not to want to please her mother even in such a trifle. How differently two lives would have come out if she had not taken it!

She was the very first one to enter the academy. Dare she go and sit in the front row so as to be close to pretty Miss Kate? Ordinarily she would have shrunk into some far corner, for she was almost painfully shy; but now something outside herself seemed to urge her on. She would not take up much room,—this something whispered,—and nobody, no, nobody at all, could love Miss Kate better than she did. So she went into the very front row, close up to the little stage on which the young performers were to appear,—a veritable stage, with real foot-lights.

Soon the people began to come in, and after a while the lights were turned up, and the exercises commenced. There were dialogues and music, and at last the master of ceremonies announced the reading of “The Romance of the Swan’s Nest,” by Miss Kate Oswald.

Other people had been interested in what went before, no doubt; but to Sally Green the whole evening had been but a prelude to this one triumphant moment for which she waited.

Pretty Miss Kate came forward like a little queen,—tall and slight, with her coronet of fair, braided hair, in which a shy, sweet rosebud nestled. She wore a dress of white muslin, as light and fleecy as a summer cloud, with a sash that might, as far as its hue went, have been cut from the deep blue sky over which that summer cloud floated. A little bunch of flowers was on her bosom, and other ornament she had none. She looked like one of the pretty creatures, half angel and half woman of fashion, which some of the modern French artists paint.

As she stepped forward she was greeted with a burst of irrepressible applause, and then the house was very still as she began to read. How her soft eyes glowed, and the blushes burned on her dainty cheeks, when she came to the lines:—

She had the whole audience for her lovers before she was through with the poem, and the last verse was followed with a perfect storm of applause. Was she not young and beautiful, with a voice as sweet as her smile? And then she was Squire Oswald’s daughter, and he was the great man of the village.

She stepped off the stage; and then the applause recalled her, and she came back, pink with pleasure. A bow, a smile, and then a step too near the poorly protected foot-lights, and the fleecy white muslin dress was a sheet of flame.

How Sally Green sprang over those foot-lights she never knew; but there she was, on the stage, and “the shawl” was wrapped round pretty Miss Kate before any one else had done any thing but scream. Close, close, close, Sally hugged its heavy woollen folds. She burned her own fingers to the bone; but what cared she? The time of the poor little mouse had come at last.

And so pretty Miss Kate was saved, and not so much as a scar marred the pink and white of her fair girl’s face. Her arms were burned rather badly, but they would heal, and no permanent harm had come to her.

Sally was burned much more severely, but she hardly felt the pain of it in her joy that she had saved her idol, for whom she would have been so willing even to die. They took her home very tenderly, and the first words she said, as they led her inside her mother’s door, were,—

“Now, mother, I know what I took the shawl for!”

I said how differently two lives would have ended if she had not taken that shawl. Pretty Miss Kate’s would have burned out then and there, no doubt; for if any one else were there with presence of mind enough to have saved her, certainly there was no other wrap there like “the shawl.” And then Sally might have grown up to the humblest kind of toil, instead of being what she is to-day; for Squire Oswald’s gratitude for his daughter’s saved life did not exhaust itself in words. From that moment he charged himself with Sally Green’s education, and gave her every advantage which his own daughter received. And, truth to tell, Sally, with her wonderful temperament, the wealth of poetry and devotion and hero-worship that was in her, soon outstripped pretty Miss Kate in her progress.

But no rivalry or jealousy ever came between them. As Sally had adored Kate’s loveliness, so, in time, Kate came to do homage to Sally’s genius; and the two were friends in the most complete sense of the word.

A BORROWED ROSEBUD.

There was a pattering footfall on the piazza, and Miss Ellen Harding went to look out. She saw a little figure standing there, among the rosebuds,—not one of the neighbors’ children, but a bonny little lassie, with curls of spun gold, and great, fearless brown eyes, and cheeks and lips as bright as the red roses on the climbing rosebush beside her.

A little morsel, not more than five years old, she was; with a white dress, and a broad scarlet sash, and a hat which she swung in her fingers by its scarlet strings. She looked so bright and vivid, and she was such an unexpected vision in that place, that it almost seemed as if one of the poppies in the yard beyond had turned into a little girl, and come up the steps.

“Did you want me?” Miss Harding asked, going up to the tiny blossom of a creature.

“No, if you please.”

“My father, then, Dr. Harding,—were you sent for him?”

The child surveyed her, as if in gentle surprise at so much curiosity.

“No,” she answered, after a moment. “I am Rosebud; and I don’t want anybody. Jane told me to come here, and she would follow presently.”

She said the words with a singular correctness and propriety, as if they were a lesson which she had been taught.

“And who is Jane?” Miss Harding asked.

Evidently the process of training had gone no further. The child looked puzzled and uncomfortable.

“Jane?” she answered hesitatingly. “Why, she is Jane.”

“Not your mamma?”

“No,—just Jane.”

“And what did Jane want here?”

“She told me to come, and she would follow presently,” said the child, saying her little lesson over again.

Evidently there was nothing more to be got out of her; but Miss Harding coaxed her to come into the cool parlor, and wait for Jane; and gave her some strawberries and cream in a gayly painted china saucer, that all children liked. Rosebud was no exception to the rest. When she had finished her berries, she tapped on the saucer with her spoon.

“I will have it for mine, while I stay,—may I?” she said. “Not to take away, but just to call, you know.”

“Surely,” said Miss Harding, more puzzled than ever. Had the sprite, then, come to stay? Were there, by chance, fairies after all,—and was this some changeling from out their ranks? She tried to entertain her small guest; and she found her quite accessible to the charms of pictures, and contented for an hour with a box of red and white chessmen. Towards night her curiosity got the better of her courtesy; and, looking from the window, she inquired,—

“I wonder where your Jane can be?”

“Presently; Jane said presently,” answered the child, with quiet composure, and returned to the chessmen.

Miss Harding heard her father drive into the yard, and slipped out to speak to him. She told her story, and the doctor gave a low, soft whistle. It was a way he had when any thing surprised him.

“It looks to me,” said he, “as if Jane, whoever she may be, intended to make us a present of Miss Rosebud. Well, we must make the small person comfortable to-night, and to-morrow we will see what to do with her.”

The small person was easily made comfortable. She ate plenty of bread-and-milk for her supper, and more strawberries; and when it was over, she went round and stood beside the doctor.

“I think you are a dood man,” she said, with the quaint gravity which characterized all her utterances. “I should like to sit with you.”

The doctor lifted her to his knee, and she laid her little golden head against his coat. There was a soft place under that coat, as many a sick and poor person in the town knew very well. I think the little golden head hit the soft place. He stroked the shining curls very tenderly. Then he asked,—

“What makes you think I’m a ‘dood’ man, Pussy-cat?”

“My name is not Pussy-cat,—I am Rosebud,” she replied gravely; “and I think you are dood because you look so, out of your eyes.”

The little morsel spoke most of her words with singular clearness and propriety. It was only when a “g” came in that she substituted a “d” for it, and went on her way rejoicing.

As the doctor held her, the soft place under his coat grew very soft indeed. A little girl had been his last legacy from his dying wife; and she had grown to be about as large as Rosebud, and then had gone home to her mother. It almost seemed to him as if she had come back again; and it was her head beneath which his heart was beating. He beckoned to his daughter.

“Have you some of Aggie’s things?” he asked. “This child must be made comfortable, and she ought to go to bed soon.”

“No,” the child said; “I’m doing to sit here till the moon comes. That means ‘do to bed.’”

“Yes, I have them,” Miss Harding answered.

She had loved Aggie so well, that it seemed half sacrilege to put her dead sister’s garments on this stranger child; and half it was a pleasure that again she had a little girl to dress and cuddle. She went out of the room. Soon she came running back, and called her father.

“O, come here! I found this in the hall. It is a great basket full of all sorts of clothes, and it is marked ‘For Rosebud.’ See,—here is every thing a child needs.”

The doctor had set the little girl down, but she was still clinging to his hand.

“I think,” he said, “that Jane has been here, and that she does not mean to take away our Rosebud.”

But the little one, still clinging to him, said,—

“I think it is not ‘presently’ yet,—Jane wouldn’t come till ‘presently.’”

“Do you love Jane?” the doctor asked, looking down at the flower-like face.

“Jane is not mamma. She is only Jane,” was the answer.

When the moon rose, the little girl went willingly to bed; and all night long Miss Ellen Harding held her in her arms, as she used to hold her little sister, before the angels took her. Since Aggie’s death, people said Miss Ellen had grown cold and stiff and silent. She felt, herself, as if she had been frozen; but the ice was melting, as she lay there, feeling the soft, round little lump of breathing bliss in her arms; and a tender flower of love was to spring up and bloom in that heart that had grown hard and cold.

There was no talk of sending Rosebud away, though some people wondered much at the doctor, and even almost blamed him for keeping this child, of whom he knew nothing. But he wanted her, and Miss Ellen wanted her; and, indeed, she was the joy and life and blessing of the long-silent household.

She was by no means a perfect child. A well-mannered little creature she was,—some lady had brought her up evidently,—but she was self-willed and obstinate. When she had said, “I’m doing to do” such and such a thing, it was hard to move her from her purpose; unless, indeed, the doctor interposed, and to him she always yielded instantly. But, just such as she was, they found her altogether charming. The doctor never came home without something in his pocket to reward her search; Miss Ellen was her bond-slave; and Mistress Mulloney in the kitchen was ready to work her hands off for her.

Often, when she had gone to bed, the doctor and Miss Ellen used to talk over her strange coming.

“We shall lose her some day,” the doctor would say, with a sigh. “No one ever voluntarily abandoned such a child as that. She is only trusted to our protection for a little while, and presently we shall have to give her up.”

“Should you be sorry, father,” Miss Ellen would inquire, “that we had had her at all?”

And the doctor would answer thoughtfully “No, for she has made me young again. I will not grumble when the snows come because we have had summer, and know how bright it is.”

But the child lived with them as if she were going to live with them for ever. If she had any memories of days before she came there, she never alluded to them. After the first, she never mentioned Jane,—she never spoke of a father or mother. But she was happy as the summer days were long,—a glad, bright, winsome creature as ever was the delight of any household.

And so the days and the weeks and the months went on, and it was October. And one day the bell rang, and Mistress Mulloney went to the door, and in a moment came to the room where Miss Ellen was sitting, with Rosebud playing beside her, and beckoned to her mistress.

“It’s some one asking for the child,” she said. “Can’t we jist hide her away? It’ll be hard for the doctor if she’s took.”

“No; we must see who it is, and do what is right,” Miss Ellen answered; but her lips trembled a little. She went into the hall, and there, at the door, stood a woman, looking like a nursery-maid of the better sort.

“I have come,” the stranger began; but Rosebud had caught the sound of her voice, and came on the scene like a flash of light.

“It is ‘presently!’” she cried; “and there, oh, there is mamma!” And down the path she flew, and into the very arms of a lady who was waiting at a little distance.

Miss Harding went down the steps. “You have come, I see, to claim our Rosebud, and she is only too ready to be claimed. I thought we had made her happy.”

The child caught the slight accent of reproach in Miss Ellen’s voice, and turned towards her.

“You have been dood, oh, so very, very dood!” she said, “but this is mamma.”

“I trusted my darling to you in a very strange way,” the lady began, “but not, believe me, without knowing in whose hands I placed her. I was in mortal terror, then, lest she should be taken from me, and I dared not keep her until she had been legally made mine, and mine only. But you have made me your debtor for life, and I shall try to show it some day.”

“But, at least, you will come in and wait until my father returns. He loves Rosebud so dearly, that it would be a cruelty to take her away until he has had time to bid her good-by.”

“You are right,” the stranger answered courteously. “Jane, go with the carriage to the hotel, and I will come or send for you when I want you.”

In a few moments more the strange lady was seated in the doctor’s parlor. Miss Harding saw now where Rosebud had got her bright, wilful beauty.

“I must explain,” the mother said, as she lifted her child upon her lap. “I am Mrs. Matthewson. My husband is dead, and Rosebud has a very, very large fortune of her own. Her uncles, who were to have the management of her property, by her father’s will, claimed her also; and I have had such a fight for her! They were unscrupulous men, and I feared to keep Rosebud with me, lest by some means they should get some hold on her. So I resolved to lend her to you for the summer; and, indeed, I never can reward you for all your care of her.”

“You can reward us only by not altogether taking her away from us. We have learned to love her very dearly.”

And, after a while, the doctor came home and heard all the story. And it was a week before Mrs. Matthewson had the heart to take away the child she had lent them. Then it was not long before the doctor and Miss Ellen had to go to see Rosebud. And then, very soon, Mrs. Matthewson had to bring her back again; and, really, so much going back and forth was very troublesome; and they found it more convenient, after a while, to join their households.

Before Rosebud came, the doctor had thought himself an old man, though he was only forty-five; but, as he said, Rosebud had made him young again; and Rosebud’s mamma found it possible to love him very dearly. But Miss Ellen always said it was Rosebud and nobody else whom her father married, and that he had been in love with the borrowed blossom from the first.

TOM’S THANKSGIVING.

“It was very provoking that seamstresses and such people would get married, like the rest of the world,” Mrs. Greenough said, half in fun and half in earnest. Her fall sewing was just coming on, and here was Lizzie Brown, who had suited her so nicely, going off to be married; and she had no resource but to advertise, and take whomsoever she could get. No less than ten women had been there that day, and not one would answer.

“There comes Number Eleven; you will see,” she cried, as the bell rang.

Kitty Greenough looked on with interest. Indeed, it was her gowns, rather than her mother’s, that were most pressing. She was just sixteen, and since last winter she had shot up suddenly, as girls at that age so often do, and left all her clothes behind her.

Mrs. Greenough was right,—it was another seamstress; and Bridget showed in a plain, sad-looking woman of about forty, with an air of intense respectability. Mrs. Greenough explained what she wanted done, and the woman said quietly that she was accustomed to such work,—would Mrs. Greenough be so kind as to look at some recommendations? Whereupon she handed out several lady-like looking notes, whose writers indorsed the bearer, Mrs. Margaret Graham, as faithful and capable, used to trimmings of all sorts, and quick to catch an idea.

“Very well indeed,” Mrs. Greenough said, as she finished reading them; “I could ask nothing better. Can you be ready to come at once?”

“To-morrow, if you wish, madam,” was the answer; and then Mrs. Graham went away.

Kitty Greenough was an impulsive, imaginative girl; no subject was too dull or too unpromising for her fancy to touch it. She made a story for herself about every new person who came in her way. After Number Eleven had gone down the stairs, Kitty laughed.

“Isn’t she a sobersides, mamma? I don’t believe there’ll be any frisk in my dresses at all if she trims them.”

“There’ll be frisk enough in them if you wear them,” her mother answered, smiling at the bright, saucy, winsome face of her one tall daughter.

Kitty was ready to turn the conversation.

“What do you think she is, mamma,—wife or widow?” And then answering her own question: “I think she’s married, and he’s sick, and she has to take care of him. That solemn, still way she has comes of much staying in a sick-room. She’s in the habit of keeping quiet, don’t you see? I wish she were a little prettier; I think he would get well quicker.”

“There’d be no plain, quiet people in your world if you made one,” her mother said, smiling; “but you’d make a mistake to leave them out. You would get tired even of the sun if it shone all the time.”

The next day the new seamstress came, and a thoroughly good one she proved; “better even than Lizzie,” Mrs. Greenough said, and this was high praise. She sewed steadily, and never opened her lips except to ask some question about her work. Even Kitty, who used to boast that she could make a dumb man talk, had not audacity enough to intrude on the reserve in which Mrs. Graham intrenched herself.

“He’s worse this morning,” whispered saucy Kitty to her mother; “and she can do nothing but think about him and mind her gathers.”

But, by the same token, “he” must have been worse every day, for during the two weeks she sewed there Mrs. Graham never spoke of any thing beyond her work.

When Mrs. Greenough had paid her, the last night, she said,—

“Please give me your address, Mrs. Graham, for I may want to find you again.”

“17 Hudson Street, ma’am, up two flights of stairs; and if I’m not there Tom always is.”

“There, didn’t I tell you?” Kitty cried exultingly, after the woman had gone. “Didn’t I tell you that he was sick? You see now,—‘Tom’s always there.’”

“Yes; but Tom may not be her husband, and I don’t think he is. He is much more likely to be her child.”

“Mrs. Greenough, I’m astonished at you. You say that to be contradictious. Now, it is not nice to be contradictious; besides, she wouldn’t look so quiet and sad if Tom were only her boy.”

But weeks passed on, and nothing more was heard of Mrs. Graham, until, at last, Thanksgiving Day was near at hand. Kitty was to have a new dress, and Mrs. Greenough, who had undertaken to finish it, found that she had not time.

“Oh, let me go for Mrs. Graham, mamma,” cried Kitty eagerly. “Luke can drive me down to Hudson Street, and then I shall see Tom.”

Mrs. Greenough laughed and consented. In a few minutes Luke had brought to the door the one-horse coupé, which had been the last year’s Christmas gift of Mr. Greenough to his wife, and in which Miss Kitty was always glad to make an excuse for going out.

Arrived at 17 Hudson Street, she tripped up two flights of stairs, and tapped on the door, on which was a printed card with the name of Mrs. Graham.

A voice, with a wonderful quality of musical sweetness in it, answered,—

“Please to come in; I cannot open the door.”

If that were “he,” he had a very singular voice for a man.

“I guess mamma was right after all,” thought wilful Kitty. “It’s rather curious how often mamma is right, when I come to think of it.”

She opened the door, and saw, not Mrs. Graham’s husband, nor yet her son, but a girl, whose face looked as if she might be about Kitty’s own age, whose shoulders and waist told the same story; but whose lower limbs seemed curiously misshapen and shrunken—no larger, in fact, than those of a mere child. The face was a pretty, winning face, not at all sad. Short, thick brown hair curled round it, and big brown eyes, full of good-humor, met Kitty’s curious glance.

“I am Tom,” the same musical voice—which made Kitty think of a bird’s warble—said, in a tone of explanation. “I can’t get up to open the door because, don’t you see, I can’t walk.”

“And why—what—Tom”—

Kitty struggled desperately with the question she had begun to ask, and Tom kindly helped her out.

“Why am I Tom, do you mean, when it’s a boy’s name; or why can’t I walk? I’m Tom because my father called me Tomasina, after his mother, and we can’t afford such long names in this house; and I can’t walk because I pulled a kettle of boiling water over on myself when I was six years old, and the only wonder is that I’m alive at all. I was left, you see, in a room by myself, while mother was busy somewhere else, and when she heard me scream, and came to me, she pulled me out from under the kettle, and saved the upper half of me all right.”

“Oh, how dreadful!” Kitty cried, with the quick tears rushing to her eyes. “It must have almost killed your mother.”

“Yes; that’s what makes her so still and sober. She never laughs, but she never frets either; and oh, how good she is to me!”

Kitty glanced around the room, which seemed to her so bare. It was spotlessly clean, and Tom’s chair was soft and comfortable—as indeed a chair ought to be which must be sat in from morning till night. Opposite to it were a few pictures on the wall,—engravings taken from books and magazines, and given, probably, to Mrs. Graham by some of her lady customers. Within easy reach was a little stand, on which stood a rose-bush in a pot, and a basket full of bright-colored worsteds, while a book or two lay beside them.

“And do you never go out?” cried Kitty, forgetting her errand in her sympathy—forgetting, too, that Luke and his impatient horse were waiting below.

“Not lately. Mother used to take me down into the street sometimes; but I’ve grown too heavy for her now, and she can’t. But I’m not very dull, even when she’s gone. You wouldn’t guess how many things I see from my window; and then I make worsted mats and tidies, and mother sells them; and then I sing.”

Kitty stepped to the window to see what range of vision it offered, and her eye fell on Luke. She recalled her business.

“I came to see if I could get your mother to sew two or three days for me this week.”

Tom was alert and business-like at once.

“Let me see,” she said, “to-day is Tuesday;” and she drew toward her a little book, and looked it over. “To-morrow is engaged, but you could have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, if you want so much. Please write your name against them.”

Kitty pulled off her pretty gray glove, and wrote her name and address with the little toy-pencil at the end of her chatelaine; and then she turned to go, but it was Tom’s turn to question.

“Please,” said the sweet, fresh voice, which seemed so like the clear carol of a bird, “would you mind telling me how old you are? I’m sixteen myself.”

“And so am I sixteen,” said Kitty.

“And you have a father and mother both, haven’t you?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Kitty.

“Oh, I’ve only mother, but she is good as two. Must you go now? And I wonder if I shall ever see you again?”

“Yes, you will see me again,” answered Kitty cheerily; and then, moved by a sudden impulse of her kind, frank young heart, she bent over and touched her lips to the bright, bonny face of the poor girl who must sit prisoner there for ever, and yet who kept this bright cheerfulness all the time.

“Oh mamma, I’ve had a lesson,” cried Kitty, bursting into her mother’s room like a fresh wind, “and Tom has taught it to me; and he isn’t he at all—she’s a girl just my age, and she can’t walk—not a step since she was six years old.”

And then Kitty told all the sad, tender little story, and got to crying over it herself, and made her mother cry, too, before she was through.

After dinner she sat half the evening in a brown study. Finally she came out of it, and began talking in her usual impulsive manner.

“Can’t we have them here to Thanksgiving, mamma? There’s not a single pretty thing in that house except Tom herself, and the rose-bush; and every thing did look so bare and clean and poverty-stricken; and I know they’ll never afford a good dinner in the world. Oh, say yes, mamma, dear! I know you’ll say yes, because you’re such a dear, and you love to make every one happy.”

“Yes; but, first of all, I must love to make papa happy, must I not? You know he never wants any company on Thanksgiving but grandpa and grandma and Uncle John. I’m sure you would not like to spoil papa’s old-fashioned Thanksgiving Day.”

Kitty’s countenance fell. She saw the justice of her mother’s remark, and there was no more to be said. She sat thinking over her disappointment in a silence which her mother was the one to break.

“But I’ve thought of a better thing, Puss,” said this wise mamma, who was herself every bit as tender of heart as Kitty, and cared just as much about making people happy. “No doubt Mrs. Graham and Tom would just as much prefer being alone together as papa prefers to be alone with his family; and how will it suit you if I have a nice dinner prepared for them, and let you go and take it to them in the coupé? Mrs. Graham is hardly the woman one could take such a liberty with; but I’ll beg her to let you have the pleasure of sending dinner to Tom.”

“Oh, you darling!” and Mrs. Greenough’s neck-ruffle suffered, and her hair was in danger, as was apt to be the case when Kitty was overcome with emotion, which could only find vent in a rapturous squeeze.

Before bed-time Kitty had it all planned out. She was to go in the coupé and take Bridget and the basket. Bridget was to mount guard by the horse’s head while Luke went upstairs with Kitty and brought down Tom for a drive; and while they were gone Bridget would take the basket in, and see that every thing was right, and then go home.

Mrs. Greenough consented to it all. I think she enjoyed the prospect of Tom’s ride, herself, just as much as Kitty did. While Mrs. Graham was sewing there she made the arrangement with her, approaching the subject so delicately that the most sensitive of women could not be hurt, and putting the acceptance of both drive and dinner in the light of a personal favor to Kitty, who had taken such a fancy to Tom.

The last afternoon of Mrs. Graham’s stay Kitty called her mother into her room. Mrs. Greenough saw spread out upon the bed a thick, warm, soft jacket, a woollen dress, a last year’s hat.

“You know them by sight, don’t you, mother mine? They are the last winter’s clothes that I grew away from, and have taken leave of. May Tom have them?”

“Yes, indeed, if you’ll undertake to give them to Tom’s mother.”

Kitty had seldom undertaken a more embarrassing task. She stole into the sewing-room with the things in her arms.

“You’ll be sure, won’t you, Mrs. Graham, not to let Tom know she’s going to ride until I get there, because I want to see how surprised she’ll look?”

“Yes, I’ll be sure, never fear.”

“And, Mrs. Graham, here are my coat and hat and dress that I wore last year, and I’ve grown away from them. Would you mind letting Tom wear them?”

“Would I mind?” A swift, hot rush of tears filled Mrs. Graham’s eyes, which presently she wiped away, and somehow then the eyes looked gladder than Kitty had ever seen them before. “Do you think I am so weakly, wickedly proud as to be hurt because you take an interest in my poor girl, and want to put a little happiness into her life,—that still, sad life which she bears so patiently? God bless you, Miss Kitty! and if He doesn’t, it won’t be because I shall get tired of asking Him.”

“And you’ll not let her see the hat and jacket till I come, for fear she’ll think something?”

At last Mrs. Graham smiled—an actual smile.

“How you do think of every thing! No, I’ll keep the hat and jacket out of sight, and I’ll have the dress on her, all ready.”

When Thanksgiving came Kitty scarcely remembered to put on the new fineries that Mrs. Graham had finished with such loving care; scarcely gave a thought to the family festivities at home, so eager was she about Tom’s Thanksgiving. She was to go to Hudson Street just at noon, so that Tom might have the benefit of the utmost warmth of which the chill November day was capable.

First she saw the dinner packed. There was a turkey, and cranberry-sauce, and mince-pie, and plum-pudding, and a great cake full of plums, too, and fruit and nuts, and then Mr. Greenough, who had heard about the dinner with real interest, brought out a bottle of particularly nice sherry, and said to his wife,—

“Put that in also. It will do those frozen-up souls good, once in the year.”

At last impatient Kitty was off. Bridget and the basket filled all the spare space in the coupé, and when they reached Hudson Street, Luke took the dinner and followed Kitty upstairs, while Bridget stood by the horse’s head, according to the programme. He set the basket down in the hall, where no one would be likely to notice it in opening the door, and then he stood out of sight himself, while Kitty went in.

There was Tom, in the warm crimson thibet,—a proud, happy-looking Tom as you could find in Boston that Thanksgiving Day.

“I have come to take you to ride,” cried eager Kitty. “Will you go?”

It was worth ten ordinary Thanksgivings to see the look on Tom’s face,—the joy and wonder, and then the doubt, as the breathless question came,—

“How will I get downstairs?”

And then Luke was called in, and that mystery was solved. And then out of a closet came the warm jacket, and the hat, with its gay feather; and there were tears in Tom’s eyes, and smiles round her lips, and she tried to say something, and broke down utterly. And then big, strong Luke took her up as if she were a baby and marched downstairs with her, while she heard Kitty say,—but it all seemed to her like a dream, and Kitty’s voice like a voice in a dream,—

“I’m sorry there’s nothing pretty to see at this time of year. It was so lovely out-doors six weeks ago.”

Through Beach Street they went, and then through Boylston, and the Common was beside them, with its tree-boughs traced against the November sky, and the sun shone on the Frog Pond, and the dome of the State House glittered goldenly, and there were merry people walking about everywhere, with their Thanksgiving faces on; and at last Tom breathed a long, deep breath which was almost a sob, and cried,—

“Did you think there was nothing pretty to see to-day—this day? Why, I didn’t know there was such a world!”

The clocks had struck twelve when they left Hudson Street; the bells were ringing for one when they entered it again. Bridget was gone, but a good-natured boy stood by the horse’s head, and Kitty ran lightly upstairs, followed by Luke, with Tom in his arms.

Kitty threw open the door, and there was a table spread with as good a Thanksgiving dinner as the heart could desire, with Tom’s chair drawn up beside it. Luke set his light burden down.

Kitty waited to hear neither thanks nor exclamations. She saw Tom’s brown eyes as they rested on the table, and that was enough. She bent for one moment over the bright face,—the cheeks which the out-door air had painted red as the rose that had just opened in honor of the day,—and left on the young, sweet, wistful lips a kiss, and then went silently down the stairs, leaving Tom and Tom’s mother to their Thanksgiving.

FINDING JACK.

Conn turned over and rubbed her sleepy blue eyes. It seemed to her that the world was coming to an end all at once, there was such a Babel of noise about her. What was it? Had everybody gone mad? Then her wits began to wake up. She remembered that it was Fourth of July. That worst noise of all—why, that must be Jack’s pistol, which he had been saving up money to buy all winter and all summer. And that other sound—that must be torpedoes; and there was the old dog, Hero, barking at them, and no wonder: it was enough to make any respectable dog bark. Fire-crackers—ugh! Wasn’t the pistol bad enough, without all these side shows? Just then Jack called out from the yard below,—

“Conn! Conn!”

The girl’s name was Constantia Richmond; but she was too slight and bonny for such a long name, and everybody called her Conn.

She shook back her fair, soft curls, as golden as a baby’s still, though Conn was fourteen, and, putting a little shawl over her shoulders, peeped out of the open window—as pretty a little slip of a girl as you would care to see—and looked down on the face, half-boyish, half-manly, which was upturned to her. If Jack had been her brother, perhaps she would have scolded at him; for Conn loved her morning nap, and the general din had discomposed her, no doubt. But Jack was only her cousin, and her second cousin, at that,—and it’s curious what a difference that does make. Your brother’s your brother all the days of his life; but your cousin is another affair, and far less certain. So Conn said, quite gently,—

“What is it? Can I do any thing? But I’m sure I don’t want to help you make any more noise. This has been—oh, really dreadful!”

She spoke with a droll little fine-lady air, and put her pretty little fingers to her pretty little ears. And Jack laughed; he had not begun to think of her yet as a charming girl,—she was just Cousin Conn.

“What!” he cried. “Not like noise on Fourth of July? Why, you don’t deserve to have a country.”

“I’m sure I wish I hadn’t,” said Conn, with a little dash of spirit.

“Are you dressed?” cried the boy, nearly seventeen years old, but all a boy still.

“No.”

“Well, just hurry, then, and come down. I’m off in half an hour with the Brighton Blues, and I want you to see first how this pistol works.”

High honor this, that she, a girl, should be invited to inspect the wonderful pistol!

Conn began to dress hurriedly. What should she put on? Her white dress hung in the closet,—such a white dress as girls wore then,—all delicate ruffles, and with a blue ribbon sash, as dainty-fine as possible. She knew that was meant for afternoon, when Aunt Sarah would have company. But might she not put it on now? Perhaps Jack wouldn’t be here then, and she could be careful. So she slipped into the dainty gown, and fastened hooks and buttons in nervous haste, and then looked in the glass, as every other girl that ever lived would have done in her place.

It was a bright, fair face that she saw there—all pink and white, and with those violet eyes over which the long lashes drooped, and that soft, bright hair that lay in little rings and ripples round her white forehead, and hung a wavy mass down to the slender waist which the blue ribbon girdled. Conn was pleased, no doubt, with the sight she saw in the mirror,—how could she help being? She tripped downstairs, and out of the door. Jack whistled when he saw her.

“What! all your fineries on at this time of day? What do you think Mother Sarah will say to that?”

The pretty pink flush deepened in the girl’s cheeks, and she answered him almost as if she thought she had done something wrong,—

“I’ll be so careful, Jack. I won’t spoil it. By and by you’ll be gone; and I wanted to look nice when I saw the new pistol.”

This seemed extremely natural to Jack. The pistol was to him a matter of such moment that no amount of demonstration in its honor would have seemed too great. Viewed in this light, it really appeared quite a meritorious act that Conn should have put on the white dress; and he looked her over with that air of half-patronizing approval with which boys are apt to regard the good looks of their sisters and their cousins.

Then he exhibited the pistol. It had—as a boy’s knife or gun or boat always has—distinguishing and individual merits of its own. No other pistol, though it were run in the same mould, could quite compare with it, and it was by some sort of wonderful chance that he had become its possessor. Conn wondered and admired with him to his heart’s content. Then came breakfast, and then the marching of the Brighton Blues. This was a company of boys in blue uniforms,—handsome, healthy, wide-awake boys from fourteen to seventeen years old,—every one of them the pride of mothers and sisters and cousins. They were to march into Boston, and parade the streets, and dine at a restaurant, and see the fireworks in the evening, and I don’t know what other wonderful things.

Conn stood and watched them.—Page 129.

Jack was in the highest spirits. He was sure he and his pistol were a necessary part of the day; and he sincerely pitied Conn, because she was a girl and must stay at home.

he quoted; and then he called back to her from the gate,—

“It’s too bad, Conn, that there’s no fun for you; but keep your courage up, and I’ll bring you something.”

And so they marched away, in the gay, glad morning sunshine, following their band of music,—a boy’s band that was, too.

Conn stood and watched them, with a wistful, longing look in her great violet eyes, and the soft, bright color coming and going on her girlish cheeks. At last she gathered a bunch of late red roses, and put them in her bosom and went into the house. She sewed a little, and then she tossed her work aside, for who cares to work on holidays? Then she took up her new book; but the tale it told seemed dull and cold beside the warm throbbing life of which the outside world was full. She wished over and over that she were a boy, that she might have marched away with the rest. Then she wondered if she could not go into town and see them from somewhere in all their glory. Very little idea had she of a Boston crowd on Fourth of July. She had been into town often enough, with her aunt or her uncle, and walked through the quiet streets; and she thought she should have little trouble in doing the same now. She looked in her purse; she had not much money, but enough so that she could ride if she got tired, and she would be sure to save some to come home. She called her Aunt Sarah’s one servant, and made her promise to keep the secret as long as she could, and then tell Aunt Sarah that she had gone to Boston to find Jack and see him march with the rest.

The girl was a good-natured creature, not bright enough to know that it was her duty to interfere, and easily persuaded by Conn’s entreaties and the bit of blue ribbon with which they were enforced.

And so Conn started off, as the boys had done before her, and went on her way. But she had no gay music to which to march, and for company she had only her own thoughts, her own hopes. Still she marched bravely on.

There were plenty of other people going the same way; indeed it seemed to Conn as if everybody must be going into Boston. Excitement upheld her, and she trudged along, mile after mile, across the pleasant mill-dam, and at last she reached Beacon Street. Her head had begun to throb horribly by the time she got into town. It seemed to her that all the world was whirling round and round, and she with it. But she could not turn back then; indeed, she did not know how to find any conveyance, and she knew her feet would not carry her much farther. Surely, she must see Jack soon. He had said they should march through Beacon Street. She would ask some one. She had an idea that every one must know about any thing so important as the Brighton Blues. At last she got courage to speak to a kind-looking servant-maid in the midst of a group on the steps of one of the Beacon-street houses. The girl pitied her white face, so pale now, with all the pretty pink roses faded from the tired young cheeks, and answered kindly.

She did not know about the Brighton Blues, but she guessed all the companies had been by there, or would come. Wouldn’t the young lady sit down with them on the steps, and rest, and wait a little?

And “the young lady” sat down. What could she do else, with the whole world whirling, whirling, and her feet so strangely determined to whirl out from under her? And then it grew dark, and when it came light again there was a wet cloth on her hair, and she lay on a lounge in a cool basement, and the kind girl who had cared for her told her that she had fainted. And then she had some food and grew refreshed a little, but was strangely confused yet, and with only one thought, to which she held with all the strength of her will,—that she had come to see Jack and must look for him till he came. So on the steps she stationed herself, and the crowd surged by. Military companies, grown-up ones, came and went with glitter of brave uniforms and joyful clamor of music, and Conn watched, with all her soul in her eyes, but still no Jack.

It was mid-afternoon at last when suddenly she saw the familiar blue, and marching down the street came the boyish ranks, following their own band—tired enough, all of them, no doubt, but their courage kept up by the music and the hope of fireworks by and by. Conn strained her eyes. She did not mean to speak, but after a little, when the face she longed for came in sight, something within her cried out with a sharp, despairing cry, “Oh, Jack, Jack!”

And Jack heard. Those who were watching saw one boy break from the long blue line, and spring up the step where Conn sat, and seize in strong hands the shoulders of a girl all in white, her face as white as her gown, and some red roses, withered now, upon her breast.

“Conn—Conn Richmond!” the boy cried, “what does this mean?”

“Don’t scold—oh, don’t scold, Jack!” said the pitiful, quivering lips. “I only came in to see you marching with the rest, and—I’m tired.”

“Yes,” said the girl who had befriended her, “and she fainted clean away, and she’s more dead than alive now; and if you’ve a heart in your bosom, you’ll let your play soldiering go, and take care of her.”

And just then Jack realized, boy as he was, that he had a heart in his bosom, and that his Cousin Conn was the dearest and nearest thing to that heart in the whole world. But he did not tell her so till long years afterwards. Just now his chief interest was to get her home. No more marching for him; and what were fireworks, or the supper the boys were to take together, in comparison with this girl, who had cared so much to see him in his holiday glory?

He took her to an omnibus, which ran in those days to Brighton, and by tea-time he had got her home. He found his mother frightened and helpless, and too glad to get Conn back to think of scolding.

It was six years after that, that in the battle of Malvern Hill, July 1, 1862, Jack, a real soldier then, and no longer a boy playing at the mimicry of war, was wounded; and next day the news came to the quiet Brighton home.

Conn had grown to be a young lady in the sweet grace of her twenty summers, and she was her Aunt Sarah’s help and comfort. To these two women came the news of Jack’s peril. The mother cried a little helplessly; but there were no tears in Conn’s eyes.

“Aunt Sarah,” she said quietly, “I am going to find Jack.”

And that day she was off for the Peninsula. It was the Fourth of July when she reached the hospital in which her Cousin Jack had been placed. She asked about him, trembling; but the news, which reassured her, was favorable. He was wounded, but not dangerously. It was a girlish instinct, which every girl will understand, that made Conn put on a fresh white gown before she used the permission she had received to enter the hospital. She remembered—would Jack remember also?—that other Fourth of July on which they had found each other, six years before. As if nothing should be wanting of the old attire, she met, as she passed along the street, a boy with flowers to sell,—for the flowers bloomed, just as the careless birds sang, even amid the horrors of those dreadful days,—and bought of him a bunch of late red roses, and fastened them, as she had done that other day, upon her breast.

The sun was low when she entered the hospital, and its last rays kindled the hair, golden still as in the years long past, till it looked like a saint’s aureole about her fair and tender face. She walked on among the suffering, until, at last, before she knew that she had come near the object of her search, she heard her name called, just as she had called Jack’s name six years before,—

“Oh, Conn, Conn!”

And then she sank upon her knees beside a low bed, and two feeble arms reached round her neck and drew her head down.

“I was waiting for you, Conn. I knew you would come. I lay here waiting till I should see you as you were that day long ago,—all in white, and with red roses on your breast,—my one love in all the world!”

And the girl’s white face grew crimson with a swift, sweet joy, for never before had such words blessed her. She did not speak; and Jack, full of a man’s impatience, now that at last he had uttered the words left unsaid so long, held her fast, and whispered,—

“Tell me, Conn, tell me that you are mine, come life or death. Surely you would not have sought me here if you had not meant it to be so! You are my Conn,—tell me so.”

And I suppose Conn satisfied him, for two years after that she was his wife, and last night he gave the old pistol of that first Fourth of July to a young ten-year-old Jack Richmond to practise with for this year’s Fourth; and pretty Mother Conn, as fair still as in her girlhood, remonstrated, as gentle mothers will, with,—

“Oh Jack, surely he is too young for such a dangerous plaything.”

Father Jack laughed as he lifted little Conn to his knee, and answered,—

“Nonsense, sweetheart. He is a soldier’s boy, and a little pistol-shooting won’t hurt him.”

But how noisy it will be round that house on Fourth of July!

HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER.

Syl Graham was an only child. Her name was Sylvia, but everybody called her Syl, except that sometimes, half playfully and half chidingly, her father called her Sylly. But that was a liberty no one else took,—and for which Mr. Graham himself was not unlikely to pay in extra indulgence.

Syl was seventeen, and she had never known any trouble in all her young, bright life. Her mother had died when she was two years old; and this, which might easily have been the greatest of misfortunes,—though Syl was too young to know it,—had been turned almost into a blessing by the devotion of her father’s sister, Aunt Rachel, who came to take care of the little one then, and had never left her since.

Not the dead Mrs. Graham herself could have been more motherly or more tender than Aunt Rachel; and the girl had grown up like a flower in a shaded nook, on which no rough wind had ever been allowed to breathe.

And a pretty flower she was; so her father thought when she ran into the hall to meet him, as he came in from business at the close of the short November day.

The last rays of daylight just bronzed her chestnut hair. Her face was delicately fair,—as the complexion that goes with such hair usually is,—colorless save in the lips, which seemed as much brighter than other lips as if they had added to their own color all that which was absent from the fair, colorless cheeks. The brown eyes were dancing with pleasant thoughts, the little, girlish figure was wonderfully graceful, and Papa Graham looked down at this fair, sweet maiden with a fond pride, which the sourest critic could hardly have had a heart to condemn.

“Are you cross?” she said laughingly, as she helped him off with his overcoat.

“Very,” he answered, with gravity.

“I mean are you worse than usual? Will you be in the best humor now or after dinner?”

“After dinner, decidedly, if Aunt Rachel’s coffee is good.”

Syl nodded her piquant little head. “I’ll wait, then.”

The dinner was good enough to have tempted a less hungry man than Mr. Graham, and the coffee was perfect. Papa’s dressing-gown and slippers were ready, upstairs; and when he had sat down in the great, soft easy-chair that awaited him, and his daughter had settled herself on a stool at his feet, I think it would have been hard to find a more contented-looking man in all New York.

“Now I’m very sure you are as good as such a bear can be,” said saucy Syl; “and now we’ll converse.”

To “converse” was Syl’s pet phrase for the course of request, reasoning, entreaty, by which Papa Graham was usually brought to accede to all her wishes, however extravagant. He rested his hand now on her shining chestnut braids, and thought how like she was to the young wife he had loved so well, and lost so early. Then he said teasingly,—

“What is it, this time? A Paris doll, with a trunk and a bandbox; or a hand-organ?”

“For shame, papa! The doll was four years ago.”

“All the more reason it must be worn out. Then it’s the hand-organ. But I must draw the line somewhere,—you can’t have the monkey. If Punch and Judy would do, though?”

“Now, Father Lucius, you know I gave up the hand-organ two years ago, and took a piano for my little upstairs room instead; and you know I’m seventeen. Am I likely, at this age, to want monkeys, Punch and Judys, and things?”

“O, no! I forgot. Seventeen,—it must be a sewing-machine. You want to make all your endless bibs and tuckers more easily. Well, I’ll consent.”

Syl blushed. It was a sore point between her and Aunt Rachel that she so seldom sewed for herself. Aunt Rachel had old-fashioned notions, and believed in girls that made their own pretty things.

“Now, papa, you are not good-humored at all. I had better have asked you before dinner. You don’t even let me tell you what I want.”

Papa sobered his face into a look of respectful attention, and waited silently. But now Syl was not quite ready to speak.

“Don’t you think pomegranate is a pretty color, papa?”

“What is it like?”

“O, it’s the deepest, richest, brightest, humanest red you ever saw.”

“Why, I think it must be like your lips;” and he drew her to him, and kissed the bright young mouth with a lazy content.

“Perhaps it is like my lips; then, surely it will look well with them.”

“Where does this blossom of beauty grow?”

“It grows at Stewart’s. It has been woven into a lovely, soft-falling silk, at four dollars a yard. Twenty-five yards makes a gown, and eight yards of velvet makes the trimming and the sleeveless jacket, and the velvet is six dollars a yard. And then there is Madame Bodin, she charges like a horrid old Jew,—forty dollars just to look at a gown; and then there are the linings and buttons and things. Have you kept account, papa, and added it all up in your head?”

“I think it means about two hundred dollars. Isn’t that what you call it, Sylly?”

“Yes, if you please. It’ll be worth that, won’t it, to have your daughter look like a love, when all the people come on New Year’s Day?”

“So that’s it,—that’s what this conspiracy against my peace and my pocket has for its object,—that Miss Syl Graham may sit at the receipt of callers on New Year’s Day, in a robe like a red, red rose. O Sylly, Sylly!”

Syl pouted a little, the most becoming pout in the world.

“Well, I’m sure I thought you cared how I look. If you don’t, never mind. My old black silk is still very neat and decent.”

“September, October, November,—it’s nearly three months old, isn’t it? What a well-behaved gown it must be to have kept neat and decent so long! And as to the other, I’ll consider, and you can ask me again when I come home to-morrow.”

Syl knew what Papa Graham’s considers meant, and how they always ended. She had gained her point, and she danced off and sang to the piano some old Scotch airs that her father loved, because Syl’s mother used to sing them; and Papa Graham listened dreamily to the music, while his thoughts went back twenty years, to the first winter when he brought his girl-bride home, only a year older, then, than Syl was now. He remembered how the firelight used to shine on her fair, upturned face, as she knelt beside him; how sweet her voice was; how pure and true and fond her innocent young heart. And now Syl was all he had left of her.

Should he lose Syl herself, soon? Would some bold wooer come and carry her away, and leave him with only Aunt Rachel’s quiet figure and fading face beside him for the rest of his life?

Just then Syl might have asked him not in vain for any thing, even to the half of his kingdom.

Next morning Syl went into the sewing-room. A young girl just about her own age was there—altering, sewing, making all the foolish little fancies in which Syl’s heart delighted, though her idle fingers never wrought at them. Out of pure kindness of heart Syl found her way into the sewing-room very often when Mary Gordon was there. She knew her presence carried pleasure with it, and often she used to take some story or poem and read to the young listener, with the always busy fingers, and the gentle, grateful face.

But to-day she found the girl’s eyes very red as if with long weeping. If Syl was selfish it was only because she never came in contact with the pains and needs of others. She had “fed on the roses and lain among the lilies of life,”—how was she to know the hurt of its stinging nettles? But she could not have been the lovesome, charming girl she was if she had had a nature hard and indifferent to the pains of others.

To see Mary Gordon’s red eyes was enough. Instantly she drew the work out of the fingers that trembled so; and then she set herself to draw the secret sorrow out of the poor, trembling heart.

It was the old story, so sadly common and yet so bitterly sad, of a mother wasting away and fading out of life, and a daughter struggling to take care of her, and breaking her heart because she could do so little.

“I’m used to all that,” the girl said sadly, “and I don’t let myself cry for what I can’t help. But this morning I heard her say to herself, as I was getting every thing ready for her, ‘O, the long, lonesome day!’ She thought I did not hear her, for she never complains; but somehow it broke me down. I keep thinking of her, suffering and weary and all alone. But I can’t help that, either; and I must learn to be contented in thinking that I do my best.”

“But can’t you stay at home with her and work there?” cried Syl, all eager sympathy and interest.

“No, I can’t get work enough in that way. People want their altering and fixing done in their own houses, and plain sewing pays so poorly. Sometimes I’ve thought if I only had a machine, so I could get a great deal done, I might manage but to hire one would eat up all my profits.”

Syl thought a little silent while; and it was a pretty sight to see the fair young face settle into such deep earnestness.

“Well,” she said at length, “at least you shall stay at home with her to-morrow; for all those ruffles can be done just as well there as here, and you shall carry them home with you. And you’d better go early this afternoon; there’ll be enough work to last you, and I can’t bear to think of her waiting for you, and wanting you, so many long hours. We’ll give her a little surprise.”

Mary Gordon did not speak for a moment. I think she was getting her voice steady, for when she did begin it trembled.

“I can’t thank you, Miss Syl,—it’s no use to try; but the strange part is how you understand it all, when you’ve no mother yourself.”

“Ah, but you see I have papa and auntie, and I just know.”

That day, after Syl and Aunt Rachel had lunched together, Syl said, in a coaxing little way she had,—

“Aunt Rachel, we never want to see the other half of that cold chicken again, do we?”

“Why, Syl—we”—

“Why, auntie, no—we never want to-morrow’s lunch furnished coldly forth by this sad relic. And there’s a tumbler of jelly we don’t want, either—and those rolls, and,—let me see, can sick people eat cake?”

“Why, Syl Graham, what are you talking about! Who’s sick?”

Syl grew sober.

“I’m thinking about poor Mary Gordon’s mother, auntie. She’s sick, and dying by inches; and Mary has to leave her all alone; and I’ve told her she shall stay at home to-morrow and make my ruffles, and we’ll pay her just the same as if she came here. And don’t you see that we must give her her dinner to take home, since she can’t come here after it?”

Aunt Rachel never said a word, but she got up and kissed Syl on each cheek. Then she brought a basket, and into it went the cold chicken and a cold tongue and jelly and buttered rolls and fruit, till even Syl was satisfied; and she took the heavy basket and danced away with it to the sewing-room, with a bright light in her dear brown eyes.

“I think you’d best go now,” she said. “I can’t get your mother, waiting there alone, out of my mind, and it’s spoiling my afternoon, don’t you see? And because you mustn’t come here to dine to-morrow, you must carry your dinner home with you; and Aunt Rachel put some fruit and some jelly in the basket that maybe your mother will like.”

That night, when Mr. Lucius Graham let himself into the hall with his latch-key, his daughter heard him and went to meet him, as usual. But she was very silent, and he missed his teasing, saucy, provoking Syl.

“Why, daughter, are you in a dream?” he asked once during dinner; but she only laughed and shook her head. She held her peace until she had him at her mercy, in the great easy-chair, and she was on the stool beside him, as her wont was. Then, suddenly, her question came.

“Papa, do you think a pomegranate silk without velvet would be very bad?”

He was inclined to tease her, and began with “Hideous!” but then he saw that her lips were fairly trembling, and her face full of eagerness, and forbore.

“How did you know you were to have the silk at all? But you know your power over me. Here is your needful;” and he put into her hands ten bright, new twenty-dollar bills.

“O, thank you! and do you think it would be bad without the velvet?”

“Sylly, no; but why shouldn’t you have the velvet if you want it?”

And then came the whole story of poor Mary Gordon, and—in such an eager tone,—

“Don’t you see, with the money the velvet would cost, and a little more, I could get her the sewing-machine; and Madame Bodin wouldn’t ask so much to make the dress if it is plainer?”

Mr. Graham was a rich man, and his first thought was to give her the money for the machine, and let her have her pretty dress, as she had fancied it, first. But a second thought restrained him. She was just beginning to learn the joy and beauty of self-sacrifice. Should he interfere? He kissed her with a half-solemn tenderness, and answered her,—

“You shall do precisely as you please, my dear. The two hundred dollars is yours. Use it just as you like. I shall never inquire into its fate again.”

And then she went away—and was it her voice or that of some blessed spirit that came to him, a moment after, from the shadowy corner where the piano stood, singing an old middle-age hymn, about the city—

The next day, who so busy and happy as Syl—dragging Aunt Rachel from one warehouse to another—it was in the days when sewing-machines were costly—till she was quite sure she had found just the right machine; and then ordering it sent, at three o’clock, no earlier, no later, to Miss Gordon, No. 2 Crescent Place.

At a quarter before three Syl went there herself. The pleasure of witnessing Mary Gordon’s surprise was the thing she had promised herself, in lieu of velvet on her gown. She found the poor room neat and clean, and by no means without traces of comfort and refinement; and Mrs. Gordon was a sweet and gentle woman, such as Mary’s mother must have been to be in keeping with Mary. She chatted with them for a few minutes, noticing the invalid’s short breath and frequent cough, and Mary’s careful tenderness over her.

“It’s too bad Mary can’t be at home all the time,” said Syl.

“Yes; but then to have her to-day is such a blessing. If you knew how we had enjoyed our day together, and our feast together, I know you would feel paid for any inconvenience it cost you.”

Just then an express wagon rumbled up to the door and the bell rang loudly. Mary opened it at once, for their room was on the ground floor.

“A sewing-machine for Miss Gordon,” said a somewhat gruff voice.

“No, that cannot be. There is some mistake,” said Mary’s gentle tones. And then Syl sprang forward, in a flutter of excitement, which would have been pretty to see had there been anybody there to notice it.

“I’m sure it’s all right. Bring it in, please; and Mary, you will tell them where to put it, in the best light.”

And in five minutes or less it was all in its place, and Mary was looking, with eyes full of wonder, and something else beside wonder, at Syl Graham.

“It’s nothing,” said Syl hurriedly; “it’s only my New Year’s present to you, a little in advance of time.”

She had thought she should enjoy Mary’s surprise; but this was something she had not looked for,—this utter breaking down, these great wild sobs, as if the girl’s heart would break. And when she could speak at length, she cried with a sort of passion,—

“O Miss Syl, I do believe you have saved my mother’s life! She will get better—she must—now that I can stay here all the time and take care of her.”

Syl was glad to get out into the street. She felt something in her own throat choking her. Just a few steps off she met Dr. Meade,—her own doctor, as it chanced,—and it struck her that it would be a good thing if he would go in to see Mrs. Gordon. So she asked him.

“I’m going there,” he said. “I try to see her once every week.”

“And will she live—can she?”

The doctor answered, with half a sigh,—

“I’m afraid not. She needs more constant care, and more nourishing food and other things. I wish I could help her more, but I can only give my services, and I see so many such cases.”

“But she would take things from you, and not be hurt?”

“I should make her if I had a full purse to go to.”

“Well, then, here are forty dollars for her; and you are to get her what she needs, and never let her know where it came from—will you?”

“Yes, I will,” he answered earnestly. And then, after a moment, he said,—“Syl Graham, you are your mother’s daughter. I can say no better thing of you,—she was a good woman.”

Syl had a hundred dollars left; but that wouldn’t compass the pomegranate silk, and Syl had concluded now she did not want it. She had had a glimpse of something better; and that hundred dollars would make many a sad heart glad before spring.

On New Year’s Day, Papa Graham was off all day making calls; and the gas was already lighted when he went into his own house, and into his own drawing-room. He saw a girl there with bands of bright chestnut hair about her graceful young head; with shining eyes, and lips as bright as the vivid crimson roses in her braided hair, and in the bosom of her black silk gown. He looked at her with a fond pride and a fonder love; and then he bent to kiss her,—for the room was empty of guests just then. As he lifted his head and met Aunt Rachel’s eyes, it happened that he said about the same words Dr. Meade had used before,—

“She is her mother’s daughter; I can say of her no better thing.”

MY QUARREL WITH RUTH.

I suppose if I had not loved Ruth Carson so much my resentment against her would not have been so bitter. She was my first friend. She had no sister, neither had I; and we used to think that no sisters could be nearer to each other than we were. She had black eyes,—great, earnest, beautiful eyes, with pride and tenderness both in them; sometimes one and sometimes the other in the ascendant. I was yellow-haired and blue-eyed, but we always wanted our gowns and hats alike, and coaxed our mothers into indulging us. I don’t know whether Ruth suffered more in appearance when the clear dark of her face was set in my pale blues, or I, when her brilliant reds and orange turned me into a peony or a sunflower; but we thought little about such effects in those days. If Ruth got her new article of attire first, I must have one like it, whether or no; and if I was first favored, she followed my example.

It was thus in every thing. We studied from the same text-books, keeping a nearly even pace Ruth was quicker than I at figures, so she helped me there; and my eyes were better than her near-sighted ones at finding towns, mountains, and fivers on the atlas, so we always did our “map questions” together. Of course our play hours were always passed in company, and one face was almost as familiar as the other in each of our houses. “The twins,” people used to call us, for fun; and if ever two girls were all and all to each other, we were.

What did we quarrel about? It is a curious thing that I have forgotten how it began. It was some little difference of opinion, such as seldom occurred between us; and then, “what so wild as words are?” We said one thing after another, until, finally, Ruth’s black eyes flashed, and she cried out passionately,—

“I just about hate you, Sue Morrison!”

Then my temper flamed. It was a different kind of temper from Ruth’s,—slower to take fire, but much more sullen and resolute. I loved her as I did my own life, but I hated her also, just then,—if you can understand that contradiction. I looked at her, and I remember I thought, even then, how handsome she was, with the red glow on her cheeks, and her eyes so strangely bright. I could have kissed her for love, or cursed her for hate; but the hate triumphed. Slowly I said,—

“Very well, Ruth Carson. I shall not trouble you any more. I shall never speak to you again, until I see you lie a-dying.”

I don’t know what made me put that last sentence in. I suppose I thought, even then, that I could not have her go out of the world, for good and all, without one tender word from me. When I spoke, Ruth turned pale, and the light died in her eyes. I presume she did not think I really meant what I said; but, at any rate, it startled her. She did not answer. She just looked at me a moment. Then she turned away, and, for the first time in years, she and I walked home, so far as our roads lay the same way, on opposite sides of the street.

“Where is Ruth?” my mother asked, when I went in.

“Gone home, I believe,” was my only answer.

It seemed to me that I could not tell even my mother of this estrangement, which had changed in a day the whole current of my life. Of course, as time went on, she saw that all was different between Ruth and me; but, finding that I did not voluntarily tell her any thing, she ceased even to mention Ruth in my presence.

You cannot think how strange and solitary my new life seemed to me. For the first time since I could remember I felt all alone. I don’t think Ruth thought this unnatural state of things could last. The first day after our quarrel she spoke to me, at school, half timidly. I looked at her, and did not answer. She sighed, and turned away; and again, when school was over, each of us went home alone on our separate path.

Sometimes I would find a bunch of roses on my desk, for it was June when our quarrel took place, and all the roses were in bloom. Then, later, I would lift up the desk cover and come upon an early apple or a peach; later still, a handful of chestnuts. I always let the roses wither without touching them; and the fruit I gave away, as if unconscious where it came from. Ruth would watch me and sigh; but after that first morning she never spoke to me. I think my rebuff then hurt her too much for her to be willing to risk receiving such another. What a strange, new, sad thing it was to get our lessons, as we did now, all alone! How the hateful figures tormented me, without Ruth’s quick brain to help me unravel them! How puzzled she looked, as I saw her holding the map close to her near-sighted eyes, trying to find the rivers and lakes and mountains all by herself!

It was a curious thing that after the first two or three days my anger had passed away entirely. I held no longer the least bitterness in my heart toward Ruth; and yet I felt that I must keep my word. I looked upon my rash utterance as a vow, for which I had a sort of superstitious reverence. Then, too, there was a queer, evil kind of pride about me,—something that wouldn’t let me speak to her when I had said I wouldn’t,—wouldn’t let me show her that I was sorry. The teacher spoke to me about the trouble between me and Ruth, but he might as well have spoken to a blank wall,—I did not even answer him. Whether he said any thing to Ruth I do not know.

In the late fall there was a vacation, which held over Thanksgiving. I had an idea that my mother watched me curiously to see how I would pass those weeks without Ruth. But I was resolute to show no pain or loneliness. I made occupations for myself. I read; I worked worsted; I crocheted; I copied out poems in my common-place book; I was busy from morning till night. One thing I did not do,—I did not take another friend in Ruth’s stead. Several of the girls had shown themselves willing to fill the vacant place, but they soon found that “No admittance here” was written over the door. I think they tried the same experiment with Ruth, with the same result. At any rate, each of us went on our solitary way, quite alone. Ruth had her own pride, too, as well as I; and, after a little while, she would no more have spoken to me than I to her; but she could not help those great, dark eyes of hers resting on me sometimes with a wistful, inquiring look, that almost brought the tears to mine.

School commenced again the first of December. Ruth came, the first day, in her new winter dress. It was a deep, rich red; and somehow she made me think of the spicy little red roses of Burgundy, that used to grow in my grandmother’s old-fashioned garden. My own new gown was blue. For the first time in years, Ruth and I were dressed differently. We were no longer “the twins.” I thought Ruth looked a little sad. She was very grave. I never heard her laugh in these days. When it rained or snowed, and we stayed at school through the noonings, instead of going home for our dinner, neither of us would join in the games that made the noontime merry. I suppose each was afraid of too directly encountering the other.

But when the good skating came, both of us used to be on the pond. The whole school, teacher and all, would turn out on half holidays. Both Ruth and I were among the best skaters in school My father had taught us, two or three winters before, and we had had great pride in our skill. We had always skated in company before; but now, as in every thing else we did, we kept at a distance from each other.

The pond used to be a pretty sight, on those crisp, keen winter afternoons, all alive with boys and girls. A steep hill rose on one side of it, crowned by a pine wood, green all the winter through. Great fields of snow stretched far and away on the other side, and in the midst was the sheet of ice, smooth as glass. Here was a scarlet hood, and there a boy’s gay Scotch cap. Here some adventurer was cutting fantastic capers; there a girl was struggling with her first skates, and falling down at almost every step. I loved the pastime,—the keen, clear air, the swift motion, the excitement. I loved to watch Ruth, too, for by this time not only was all the bitterness gone from my heart, but the old love was welling up, sweet and strong, though nothing would have made me acknowledge it to myself. Wherever she moved, my far-sighted eyes followed her; and, indeed, she was a pretty sight, the prettiest there, in her bright scarlet skating dress, and with her cheeks scarcely less scarlet, and her great eyes bright as stars.

There came a day, at last, when we promised ourselves an afternoon of glorious skating. The ice was in excellent condition, the sky was cloudless, the weather cold, indeed, but not piercing, and the air exhilarating as wine. I ate my dinner hurriedly—there was no time to lose out of such an afternoon. I rose from the table before the rest, put on my warm jacket and my skating-cap, and was just leaving the house when my father called after me.

“Be very careful of the west side of the pond, Sue. They have been cutting a good deal of ice there.”

The whole school was out; only when I first got there I did not see Ruth. The teacher repeated to us what my father had said, but I remembered afterward that it was not till he had done speaking that Ruth came in sight, looking, in her bright scarlet, like some tropical bird astray under our pale northern skies. As usual she and I began skating at some distance from each other, but gradually I drew nearer and nearer to her. I had no reason for this. I did not mean to speak to her, and the pride that held me from her was as untamed as ever. But yet something for which I could not account drew me towards her.

Did she see me, and wish to avoid me? I did not know; but suddenly she began to skate swiftly away from me, and toward the dangerous west side of the pond. I think I must have called, “Come back! come back!” but if I did, she did not heed or hear. She was skating on, oh, so fast! I looked around in despair—I was nearer to her than any one else was. I shouted, with all my might, to Mr. Hunt, the teacher. I thought I saw him turn at the sound of my voice, but I did not wait to be sure. I just skated after Ruth.

I never can tell you about that moment. All the love with which I had loved her swept back over my heart like a great flood. Pride and bitterness, what did they mean? I only knew that I had loved Ruth Carson as I should never, never love any other friend; and that if she died I wanted to die too, and be friends with her again in the next world, if I could not here. I think I called to her, but the call was wasted upon the wind which always bore my voice the other way. So Ruth skated on and on, and I skated after her. Whether any one was coming behind me I did not know. I never even looked over my shoulder. It seemed to me that some mad wind of destiny was sweeping us both ahead.

Suddenly there came a plash, the scarlet cap appeared a moment above the ice, and then that went under, and there was no Ruth in sight, anywhere. You cannot think how calm I was. I wonder at it now, looking back over so many years, to that bright, sad, far-off winter day. I succeeded in checking my own headlong speed, and, drawing near cautiously to the spot where Ruth had gone down, I threw myself along the ice. It was thick and strong, and had been cut into squares, so it bore me up. I looked over the edge. Ruth was rising toward me. I reached down and clutched her, I hardly know by what. At that moment I felt my ankles grasped firmly by two strong hands, and then I knew that I could save Ruth. I held her until some one helped me to pull her out, and then I don’t know what came next.

I waked up, long afterward, in my own bed, in my own room. I seemed to myself to have been quite away from this world, on some long journey. A consciousness of present things came back to me slowly. I recalled with a shudder the hard, sharply cut ice, the water gurgling below, and Ruth, my Ruth, with her great black eyes and her bright, bonny face, going down, down. I cried out,—

“Ruth! Ruth! where are you?”

And then I turned my head, and there, beside me, she lay, my pretty Ruth—mine again, after so long.

“She clung to you so tightly we could not separate you,” I heard my mother say; but all my being was absorbed in looking at Ruth. She was white as death. I had said I would not speak to her again until I saw her lie a-dying. Was she dying now? I lifted myself on my elbow to look at her. I held my own breath to see if any came from her half-parted lips; and as I looked, her eyes unclosed, and she put her arm up,—oh, so feebly!—and struggled to get it round my neck. I bent over her, and one moment our lips clung together, in such a kiss as neither of us had ever known before—a kiss snatched from death, and full of peace and pardon, and the unutterable bliss of a restored love. Then Ruth whispered,—

“Sue, I have been only half a girl since I lost you. I would rather have died there, in the black water from which you saved me, than not to find you again.”

“I thought you were dying, Ruth,” I whispered back, holding her close; “and if you were, I meant to die too. I would have gone after you into the water but what I would have had you back.”

Then we were too weak to say any thing more. We just lay there, our hands clasped closely, in an ineffable content. Our mothers came and went about us; all sorts of tender cares were lavished on us of which we took no heed. I knew only one thing,—that I had won back Ruth; Ruth knew only one thing,—that once more she was by my side.

That was our first and our last quarrel. I think no hasty word was ever spoken between us afterward. The first one had cost us too dear.

WAS IT HER MOTHER?

Just a little voice, calling through the dark, “Mamma, O mamma!” and then a low sound of stifled sobbing.

Colonel Trevethick heard them both, and they smote him with a new sense of loss and pain. He had scarcely thought of his little girl since his wife died, five hours before,—died at the very instant when she was kissing him good-by, taking with her into the far heavens the warm breath of his human love. He had loved her as, perhaps, men seldom love, from the first hour of their first meeting.

“There is Maud Harrison,” some one had said; and he had turned to look, and met the innocent gaze of two frank, gentle, very beautiful brown eyes. “Brightest eyes that ever have shone,” he said to himself. Their owner had other charms besides,—a fair and lovely face, round which the ruffled hair made a soft, bright halo; a lithe, girlish figure; a manner of unaffected cordiality, blent with a certain maidenly reserve, and which seemed to him perfection. He loved her, then and there. His wooing was short and his wedding hasty; but he had never repented his haste, never known an unhappy hour from the moment he brought his wife home, nine years ago, till these last few days, in which he had seen that no love or care of his could withhold her from going away from him to another home where he could not follow her,—the home where she had gone now, far beyond his search.

She was a good little creature, and she did not rebel even at the summons to go out of her earthly Eden in search of the paradise of God. She longed, indeed, to live, for she so loved her own, and she could have resigned herself to die more willingly but for her husband’s uncontrollable passion of woe. That very day she had said to him, as he knelt beside her,—

“Do not grieve so, darling! I am not going so far but that I shall come back to you every day. Something tells me that I shall be always near you and Maudie. You cannot call, or she cry, but that I shall hear you. I know that when she most needs, or you most want me, I shall be close beside you.”

And with that very last kiss, when her breath was failing, she had whispered,—

“I shall not go so far as you think.”

Now when he heard the low call of his little Maudie and her smothered sobbing, he remembered the words of his dead wife. Did she, indeed, hear Maudie cry, and was it possibly troubling her? He got up and went into the little room where the child had slept alone ever since her sixth birthday, a couple of months ago. He bent over her low bed, and asked tenderly,—

“What is it, darling?”

A tiny night-gowned figure lifted itself up and two little arms clung round his neck.

“Bessie put me to bed without taking me to mamma. Mamma did not kiss me good-night, and I want she should,—oh, I want she should! Bessie wouldn’t carry me to see her; and I want you to. Bessie said mamma never would kiss me again but that isn’t true, is it? You know I’ve heard mamma say Bessie wasn’t always ’sponsible.”

Colonel Trevethick considered for a moment what he should say to his child—how he could make her understand the great, sad, awful, yet triumphant mystery which had come to pass that day under their roof—the great loss, and the great hope that hallowed it.

She was such a mere baby it seemed hard to choose his words. Must he tell her that her mamma would never kiss her again? But how did he know that? When the dear Lord promised the “all things” to those who loved Him, did it not include the joining of broken threads, the up-springing of dead hopes, the finding one’s own again, somewhere? He thought it must; for what a word without meaning heaven would be to him if his own Maud were not there! He temporized a little.

“She cannot kiss you now, my darling, but you shall kiss her.”

So he lifted the little white figure in his arms, holding it close, as one who must be father and mother both together, now, and carried his little one across the hall to the room, where her dead mother lay,—oh, so fast asleep!—with a look like a smile frozen upon her fair, sweet face. He held Maudie down by the pillow on which her mother’s head rested, but that did not satisfy her.

“Put me on the bed, please, papa. I get on the bed every night and kiss her, since she’s been ill.”

So he let her have her will; and for a moment she nestled close to the still dead heart, which had always beaten for her so warmly. Then she lifted up her head.

“Mamma is very cold,” she said, “and she does not stir. Can she hear what I say?”

Again something invisible seemed to warn him against taking away from the child her mother. He answered very gently and slowly,—

“She’s dead, my darling,—what we call dead. I do not understand it—no one understands it; but it comes, one day, to everybody, and it is God’s will. Your mamma cannot speak to us any more, and soon she will be gone out of our sight; but she truly believed that she would always be able to see your face and hear your voice, as when she was here.”

“She is here. Won’t she be here always?” the little girl asked, growing cold with the shadow of an awful fear.

“No, dear, she will not be here long. In a few days this dear white face will be put away, underneath the grass and the flowers; but the real mamma, who loves little Maudie, will not be buried up. She will be somewhere, I truly believe, where she can see and hear her little girl.”

For a moment the child slid again from his arms, and nestled close against the cold breast, kissed the unmoving lips. Then she said,—

“Good-by, this mamma, who can’t see; and good-night, other mamma, that hears Maudie.”

Colonel Trevethick marvelled. Had he, indeed, succeeded in making this little creature understand; or had some one whom he could not see spoken to her words of sweet mother-wisdom?

He carried her then, and laid her in her little bed, and went back to his own loneliness; but half an hour afterward he heard the small voice calling. “Papa, papa!” and again he went to her, and the little arms came up around his neck, and held him fast.

“Can’t I go too, papa? If you ask God, won’t He let me? Because I do so love my mamma.”

That afternoon Colonel Trevethick had felt as if he had nothing at all left in this world; but now he realized how much emptier still his home might be if he lost out of it this child who was so like her mother.

“Mamma would not want you to come,” he said passionately. “She has all heaven, and I only you,—only you, little Maudie, in all the world. Mamma wants you to stay with me.”

After that she was quite quiet; and when he looked in at her, an hour later, she was sound asleep, with one little hand like a crushed white rose under the red rose of her flushed cheek.

She never asked for her mother after that night; but her father was sure that she never forgot her. She was the strangest, gravest little creature. She never made any noise, even at her play; and she never did any of the things for which her mother had been used to reprove her. The trouble was that she was too perfect; there was something unnatural about it which frightened Colonel Trevethick. He would have been glad if she had been naughty, sometimes, like other children. He longed to have her tease him, to see in her some spirit of naughtiness or contradiction; but he saw none. She grew tall quite fast, but she was very thin,—a little white wraith of a creature, who looked as if she had been made out of snow, and might melt away as soon.

It was a good thing for Colonel Trevethick, no doubt, that he had her to tend, and to be anxious about. It kept him from surrendering himself to his own grief.

Nearly two years went on, and all the time the little girl grew more and more frail; until, at last, when she had just passed her eighth birthday, she was taken very ill. Her illness seemed a sort of low, nervous fever, and she grew daily more feeble. A skilful nurse came to share with Bessie the task of tending her, and her father was seldom far away. Half the day he would be sitting in her room, and half a dozen times in the night he would steal in to watch her breathing.

One afternoon, as he sat by her bed, she looked up at him with a sad, tender look, too old for her years,—but then all her words and ways were too old for her years.

“Papa,” she said, “I would get well if I could, to please you. I should get well, I know, if I had mamma to nurse me. Don’t you know how she used, if my head ached, to put her hand on it and make it stop?”

A sudden mist of tears came between his eyes and the little white face looking up at him. She had not spoken before of her mother for so many months, and yet how well she remembered! Instantly his wife’s words, that last day, came back to his memory. She had said, “I know that when Maudie needs me most, or you most want me, I shall be there beside you.”

Was she there now? Could she breathe upon the little wasting life some merciful dew of healing? or was she, perhaps, by her very love and longing, drawing the child home to herself?

That night Bessie was to sit up until one o’clock, and then to call the nurse. As for Colonel Trevethick, he would be in and out, as usual.

He went to bed, and fell into sleep and a dream. His own Maud was beside him as he saw her first, then as his bride, his wife, then with Baby Maudie on her breast; just as of old he seemed to have her with him again,—his pride, his darling, the one woman he had ever loved.

He woke at last. Had his dream, then, lasted the night through? Was this red ray that touched his face the first hint of the rising sun? He sprang up quickly. The whole night had indeed passed, and he had not seen Maudie. He hurried into a dressing-gown and went to her room. He expected to find the nurse there, but, instead, Bessie sat beside the table just where he had left her the night before, but sound asleep. Evidently she must have been asleep for hours, and had not called the nurse, who had slept in her turn: they were all tired enough, Heaven knows. But, meantime, what of Maudie? What harm had come to her, alone, unattended?

He drew aside the curtain of her little bed and looked in. Surely this was not the Maud he had left the night before, so pale and worn upon her pillows? A face looked up at him bright as the new day. A soft, healthy color was in the cheeks, and the moist lips were crimson.

“I knew I should be well if she tended me,” a voice cried, gayer and gladder than he had heard from her lips in two years.

What did the child mean? Had she gone mad? He controlled himself, and asked,—

“Who tended you, my child? I found Bessie sound asleep.”

“Yes; mamma made her sleep, and you, and nurse. She sent all of you the dreams you like best; and all night long she sat here beside my bed, with her hand on my head, just as she used to put it long ago. She was all in white, and her hair fell about her shoulders, and her eyes were very, very bright, and her lips, when she kissed me, seemed somehow to melt away.”

“So you, too, dreamed about mamma, darling?”

“No, indeed, papa, I did not dream. Mamma sat there all night long, with her hand upon my head. Sometimes I slept, but more often I woke up to look at her; and all the time she sat there, and did not tire, until the first sunshine came in at the windows; and then she kissed me and went away. I did not see her go. Perhaps I shut my eyes a moment. Then I looked and she was gone, and then I heard you coming in. She said she was with me every day, but she couldn’t have come to me like this, except because I needed her so very, very much. And she wanted to make me well, because you would grieve for me if I came to her; and I was to be very good, and tend you and make you comfortable; and I must laugh and must make you laugh, for laughter was good, and the reason I got ill was because I had been sorry so long, and had not laughed at all. And I was not to be sorry after her any more, because she was very happy, and nothing grieved her except when she saw you and me mourning for her, and not knowing that she was waiting close beside us.”

“Was it her mother? Can it be it was the child’s mother?” the father cried, uttering his thought aloud unconsciously.

“Of course it was mamma; and she has made me well. See if Dr. Dale does not tell you I am well.”

Two hours afterward Dr. Dale came. He stood for a few moments beside the little bed. He looked in the child’s glad eyes, he counted the throbs of her pulse, he made her put out her healthy little tongue. Then he turned to her father.

“Trevethick,” he said, “can you swear that this is the same little girl I left here last night? If the days of miracles were not gone by, I should say that one had been wrought here. I left, I thought, a very sick little person, about whom I was anxious enough, certainly, to make this my first call this morning; and I find my small patient so well that I shall only keep her in bed a day or two longer, for form’s sake.”

“Perhaps it is a miracle,” Colonel Trevethick said, smiling. But he did not explain. There are some experiences too marvellous for belief and too sacred for doubt or question, and that was one of them.

Two days afterward little Maudie went down to tea. She wore a fresh white gown, with lovely blue ribbons, and looked as much like a little angel in festal attire as a human child can be expected to look. But she did not take her usual seat. She sat down, instead, behind the tea-pot, where Bessie usually stood to pour out the tea.

“Hadn’t Bessie better do that?” papa asked, as he saw the little hand close round the handle of the tea-pot.

But Maud laughed, and shook her head.

“No, I don’t think Bessie is ’sponsible,” she said; “and mamma said I was to live just on purpose to do every thing for papa.”

And again Colonel Trevethick asked, but this time silently,—

“Was it—could it have been the child’s mother?”

THE LADY FROM OVER THE WAY.

It was the twilight of Christmas evening,—that twilight which always seems so early, since nobody is ever quite ready for it. The pale gray of the winter’s sky was scarcely flushed by the low-lying sunset clouds, though sometimes you could catch a gleam of their scant brightness as you turned westward.

The streets of New York were crowded, as usual, but everybody seemed even more than usually in a hurry. The air was intensely cold, and nipped the noses of those who were late with their Christmas shopping; but, in spite of it, men and women still jostled each other upon the sidewalk, or stopped to look at the tempting displays of holiday goods in the shops. Everybody, it seemed, had some small person at home who must be made happy to-morrow.

From the window of a large but rusty-looking house on one of the avenues, two children looked down at the throng below, as they had been looking all day. They were in the fourth story of the house, and they could not see into the street very distinctly, but still the movement and the bustle interested them, and their mother was thankful that they had it to watch.

She herself was sewing, catching the last glint of the sunset light for her work, as she had the first ray of the dawning. She had been a beautiful, high-bred woman; indeed, she was so still, though there was no one to note the unconscious elegance of her gestures or the graceful lines of her curving figure and bent head. She was very thin now, and very poorly clad, but a stranger would have felt that she was a lady, and wondered how she came in the fourth story of this house,—a great house, which had been handsome, too, in its day, but which was now let out to innumerable lodgers, mostly of the decent sort of honest, hard-working, half-starved poor people. Not with such neighbors had Mrs. Vanderheyden’s lot been formerly cast, nor for such uses as this had the old house itself been designed. It had been a stately mansion in its time, belonging to the estate of a good old Knickerbocker family, which was quite run out now. But there was one great comfort in this house: it had been so well built that its thick walls shut out all alien noises effectually, and made solitude possible even in a tenement house. Perhaps Mrs. Vanderheyden had thought of this when she chose her abode there.

There was something in the faded grandeur of the old mansion that harmonized with the lingering grace of her own faded beauty. Its lofty walls were wainscoted with carved oak, almost black with time; and any imaginative person would have been likely to people it with the ghosts of the beautiful girls whose room no doubt this was in the old days. There, between those windows, hung, perhaps, their great, gleaming mirror, and into it they looked, all smiles and blushes and beauty, when they were ready for their first ball. But Mrs. Vanderheyden’s two little girls did not think of the other girls who might have lived there once. They were too young for that, and too hungry. Ethel, the elder, was only ten; and shy little Annie, beside her, scarcely seven. They saw a sight, however, from the window at which they stood, that interested them more than any vision of the past would have done.

The avenue on which they lived was in a transition state. Trade had come into it and lodging-houses had vulgarized it, and yet there were some of the rich old residents who still clung to the houses in which their fathers and mothers had lived and died. There was one such directly opposite; and to look into the parlor over the way, and see there all the warmth and brightness and beauty of which they themselves were deprived, had been one of the chief enjoyments of the little Vanderheydens ever since they had been in the house. They were all that Mrs. Vanderheyden had left, these two girls. Wealth was gone, friends were gone, father and father’s home, husband and husband’s home—hope itself was gone; but she was not quite alone while she had these two for whom to struggle—to live or to die, as Heaven would. It was for their sakes that she had worked from dawning till nightfall, though she had felt all the time what seemed to her a mortal sickness stealing over her. Their breakfast and dinner had been only bread, of which she herself had scarcely tasted; but to-morrow would be Christmas, and it should go hard with her but she would give them better fare then. A dozen times during the day one or the other little voice had asked anxiously,—

“Shall we surely, surely, have dinner to-morrow, because it is Christmas Day?”

And she had answered,—

“Please Heaven, you surely shall. My work is almost done;” and then she had stitched away more resolutely than ever on the child’s frock she was elaborately embroidering. The children meanwhile were feeding upon hope, and watching a scene in the house over the way, where, as they thought, all that any human creature could possibly hope for had already been given. Busy preparations had been made in that other house for Christmas. There was a great Christmas-tree in one corner, all full of little tapers, and a large, fair, gentle-looking woman had been engaged much of the afternoon in arranging gifts upon it. Now, with the twilight, a boy and girl had come in and were watching the lighting up of the Christmas-tree.

“It’s so good of them not to pull the curtains down,” Ethel said, with a sigh of delight. “It’s almost as good as being there—almost.”

“I do suppose that’s the very grandest house in all New York,” little Annie said, in a tone of awe and admiration.

“Nonsense! You only think that because you are so little,” answered Ethel, from the height of her three years more of experience. “You forget, but I can remember. We had a finer house ourselves, before poor papa died. There are plenty of them, only we’re so poor we don’t see them.”

“Oh, it’s good to be that little girl!” cried Annie. “See how pretty her dress is, and how her hair curls; and she’ll have lots of presents off that Christmas-tree.”

“So should we, if we had papa,” Ethel answered gravely. “Mamma, when we get up to heaven, do you think papa will know we’re his little girls?”

“I’m sure he will,” Mrs. Vanderheyden answered; and then she rose wearily. “It’s all done,” she said, as she shook out the lovely little robe into which she had wrought so many patient stitches. “I cannot carry it home just yet, I am so tired; I must lie down first; but you shall have a good dinner to-morrow, my darlings.”

The children had seen her very tired before, and they didn’t think much about it when she groped her way to a bed in the corner and lay down, drawing the scant bed-clothes up over her. They stood at the window still, and watched the merry children opposite, until at last a servant came and pulled down the curtains and shut away from them the Christmas-tree, with all its gleaming lights, and the boy and girl, who were dancing round it to some gay tune which their mother played.

Then Ethel and Annie began to realize that they were cold and hungry and the room was dark. Ethel lit a candle. The fire was nearly out, but she would not make another till morning.

“I won’t wake up mamma,” she said, with the premature thoughtfulness that characterized her; “she’s so tired. We’ll just have supper, and then I’ll hear you say ‘Our Father,’ and we’ll get to bed, and in the morning it will be Christmas.”

Some vague promise of good was in the very word: Ethel did not know what would come, but surely Christmas would not be like other days. “Supper” was the rest of the bread. And then the two little creatures knelt down together and said their well-known prayers, and I think “Our Father” heard, for their sleep was just as sweet as if they had been in the warm, soft nest of the children over the way, tucked in with eider down. Through the long evening hours they slept,—through the solemn midnight, when the clear, cold Christmas stars looked down, just as they had looked centuries ago when the King of Glory, Himself a little child, lay asleep in an humble manger in Judea. Nothing troubled their quiet slumber until the sunshine of the Christmas morning broke through their dingy windows, and the day had begun.

“It must be ever so late,” said Ethel, rubbing her sleepy eyes, “and mamma isn’t awake yet. But she was so tired. You lie still, Annie, and I’ll build the fire, and when she wakes up she’ll find it all done.”

Very patiently the poor little half-frozen fingers struggled with the scant kindlings and the coal that seemed determined never to light; but they succeeded at last, and the room began to grow a little warm. Then she dressed Annie, and then it began to seem very late indeed, and she wondered if mamma would never wake up. She went to the bedside and, bending over, kissed her mother gently, then started back with a sudden alarm.

“Why, Annie, she’s so cold—almost like poor papa—only you can’t remember—just before they took him away.”

“No, she can’t be like papa,” Annie said stoutly, “for he was dead, and mamma is asleep.”

“Yes, she’s asleep,” said the elder sister firmly. “We must wait till she wakes up. We’ll look over the way, and then, maybe, it won’t seem so long.”

But over the way was brighter than ever this Christmas morning. The curtains had been looped back once more, the table glittered with lovely gifts, and presently the little girl who lived there came to the windows. She looked up at them—they were sure of it; but they could not have guessed what she said, as she turned away, and spoke to her mother.

“O mamma,” cried the sweet young voice, “won’t you come and see these two poor little girls? They stood there all day yesterday and last night; and now see how sad they look. I can’t eat my Christmas candies or play with my Christmas things while they look so pale and lonesome. Won’t you go over and see them, mamma dear?”

Mrs. Rosenburgh was a woman of warm and earnest sympathies when once they were aroused. When she was a girl she too had had quick impulses like her child’s; but she had grown selfish, perhaps, as she grew older, or maybe only careless; for the quick sympathies were there still, as you could see, now that her little girl had touched them.

“To be sure I will,” she answered at once. “Poor little things! I wish we could make merry Christmas for all New York; but since we can’t, at least we won’t have faces white with want looking in at our very windows.”

So the watching, wondering children saw the large, fair lady wrap herself in a heavy shawl and tie a hood over her head, and then come out and cross the street and enter their house.

“What if she saw us, and what if she is coming here!” Ethel said breathlessly.

Then they listened as if their hearts were in their ears. They heard feet upon the stairs and then a gentle tap, and the lady from over the way stood in their room.

“I saw you at the window,” she said, “and came over to wish you a merry Christmas. How is this? Are you all alone?”

“No, ma’am, mamma is in the bed there; but she was very tired yesterday, and she hasn’t waked up.”

An awful terror seized Mrs. Rosenburgh. Had this woman died of want and weariness, in sight of her own windows? She stepped to the bedside, and drew away the clothes gently from the face of the sleeper. She looked a moment on that fair, faded face, and then she grew white as death.

“Children,” she asked, “what are your names?”

“I am Ethel Vanderheyden,” the oldest girl answered, “and she is Annie.”

“And your mother—was she Ethel Carlisle once?”

“Yes, ma’am, before she married papa.”

“And your little sister is Annie?”

“Yes; she was named for mamma’s best friend, one she hadn’t seen for a long, long time.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Rosenburgh had knelt by the bedside. She had lifted the low-lying head upon her arm, and drawn a bottle of pungent salts from her pocket, and she was crying as if her heart would break, while the children looked wondering on.

“O Ethel, my own old Ethel, wake up!” And then she dropped her cheek, all wet with tears, against the white, cold cheek, that was so still.

Oh, was it the warm tears, or the voice that sounded from far away out of the past, or only the strong odor that roused the poor soul from that long, heavy sleep of exhaustion that had so nearly been the sleep of death? I do not know, but I know the eyes did open, and beheld the tender face bending above them. And then, like a little child, the children heard their mother cry,—

“O Annie, Annie, have I been dreaming all this time?”

And then there were explanations, and the story of the long years since Annie Bryant and Ethel Carlisle were girls together was told. But the best of it all, the children thought, was when the lady from over the way took them home with her, and told them the boy and girl there should be their brother and sister, and they should live there henceforth; for she, who had found again her best friend, would never more let her struggle with want alone.

And so the children had gifts and dinner, and a merry, merry Christmas in the bright, warm, crimson-hung room, which had seemed to them such a paradise of delights when they looked down into it from their fourth-story window through the falling shadows of Christmas Eve.

HIS MOTHER’S BOY.

The days were growing very dark for George Graham. He had not known at first what it meant that black specks should so dance between him and the page he tried to read, that his eyes should ache so much, that all things should seem so strangely dim about him. It would have been better, no doubt, had he stopped work as soon as he felt these symptoms; but how could he? This was his last term at school, and if he passed his examination creditably, especially if he thoroughly mastered the bookkeeping he was trying so hard to conquer, he was to have a place in Deacon Solomon Grant’s store, with wages that would not only take care of himself, but greatly help his mother.

His mother was a widow, and George’s love for her was a sort of passion of devotion. When he could scarcely talk, the first two words he put together were, “Pretty mamma,” and ever since then she had been the first and fairest of created beings to him. He was very fond of Susie Hale, but Susie was only a nice girl,—a dear, sweet, good girl, such as any fellow would like; but his mother was the elect lady to whom were due his love, his care, his uttermost duty.

Mrs. Graham was the kind of woman for a son to be romantic about. She was only seventeen when George was born; and now, when he was sixteen and she was thirty-three, she was, so he thought, more beautiful than ever. She had been a pretty, rather helpless little creature all her life,—one of those women toward whom every man feels the instinct of protection. George’s father had felt it always, and had never allowed care to come near his dainty darling. His one great agony, as he lay dying, was that he must leave her almost unprovided for. That was when George was thirteen, and the boy would never forget how his father had called him to his bedside, and charged him to take care of his mother.

“You are old enough to be her staff, even now,” the dying man had said, clinging to his boy’s hand. “You can be good to her in a thousand ways, save her a thousand cares, and in a few years more you can work for her, and keep her comfortably, as I have done.”

George never forgot this trust for one moment. The plans he made in life were all for his mother’s sake—his future was to be spent in her service. He wanted to come out of school at the time of his father’s death, and try by all manner of little industries to help take care of the household, but his mother was too wise to permit this. She developed a strength of mind and of body for which no one who saw her pink-and-white prettiness,—the prettiness of a girl still, despite all her years of married life,—would have given her credit.

She saw clearly that if her boy’s education stopped at thirteen, he would be held in check all his life by his own ignorance—he must be drudge always, and never master. So she made him go to school three years longer.

How she lived and kept up her refined little home puzzled all lookers-on, and indeed she hardly knew herself. She lived simply; she was busy from morning till night. She sewed for one neighbor, she helped another through some season of sickness, she taught a naughty child who had worn out its welcome at school, but who could not wear out Mrs. Graham’s sweet patience,—and all these things helped. It is true, it was very often hard work to compass the simple necessaries of life, but she struggled on bravely.

When George was sixteen he should come out of school, well trained, she hoped, for a business man, and then things would be so much easier. With this hope in view, she never repined. She kept her strength of soul and her sweetness of temper, her fresh beauty and her fresh heart. She kept, too, her boy’s adoration,—an adoration which was, as I said, the romance of his life.

When the days began to grow so dark for George Graham, it was of his mother that he thought. So far he had no ambitions, no hopes, that were not centred in her. What if this growing shadow about him was to increase until all was dark, until dense night shut him in,—a night through whose blackness no star of hope could shine? What if he must be no help to his mother, but only a burden on her for ever, a burden lasting through heaven only knew how many helpless years?

He rebelled against such a fate madly. He stretched out his hands toward heaven, he lifted the dumb prayer of his darkening eyes, but no help came.

Dimmer and dimmer grew the world about him, more and more desperate the gloom of his hopeless heart. His scholarship had been so fine that his teacher hesitated to reprove his now continual failures; and George said nothing of the increasing darkness around him,—nothing to his mother, for he felt that it would break her heart; nothing to teacher or school-mates, for it seemed to him his grief would be nothing to them. But one afternoon the crisis came.

His recitation had been an utter failure, and, at last, his teacher spoke in severe terms of the neglect which had become habitual. No one who was present that day—not even the smallest child—will ever forget the look of despair that swept over George Graham’s face, or the gesture of helpless anguish with which he stretched out his hands, as if to seek among them all some friend, as he cried,—

“God help me, sir! I have been going blind; and now I cannot see one figure in my book—I can hardly see your face.”

There was a silence after this, through which came no sound but the audible beating of George Graham’s tortured heart. Then the master sent away the others, for school hours were nearly over, and tried his best to comfort his stricken pupil. It might not be so bad as he feared, an oculist might help him, perhaps it was only temporary.

To all these well-meant consolations George listened in a sort of dreary silence. The words of the teacher entered his ears, but they did not reach his heart or kindle his hope.

As soon as he could, he went away. He did not go straight home. How could he face his mother and tell her what he must tell her now,—what she would be sure to hear from others, if not from him? He kept thinking how she would take it. Would not all the light go out of her face? Maybe she would faint away, as he remembered she had done when his father died.

He sat down on a bank, a little removed from the road-side, a bank which overhung a swift and deep, yet narrow stream.

An awful temptation came over him,—such a temptation as, thank Heaven! comes to few boys of sixteen, with the young, glad life running riot in their veins. He thought, what if he should die, then and there? It seemed to him the one desirable thing. To be sure, to die would be to leave his mother to fight her battle of life alone; but also it would relieve her from the heavy burden he must needs be to her if he lived. The river rushing down there below invited him with its murmur. Should he seek refuge there, and let his mother hear that he was dead, before she heard that he was blind? He bent forward over the stream. Then he drew back, for a longing came over him to go home first, and see his mother just once more; and then an exceeding bitter cry burst from his lips,—

“See her! What am I talking about? Do I not know I shall never see her again?”

And a girl’s voice, soft and cooing and tender,—an utterly unexpected voice,—answered him,—

“Yes, you will see her again. Surely you will see her again.”

The boy turned his face toward the sound.

“How did you come here, Susie Hale?” he asked.

“Don’t be angry, George,” the gentle voice entreated. “I waited for you. I could not go home till I had told you how sorry I was, and tried to comfort you.”

“Comfort me!” There was a sort of scornful bitterness in the cry. “How can I be comforted? Do you think what it will be never to see the green earth or the blue sky, or any dear face any more, for ever and ever?”

“But you will see them,” she said gently. “I did not mean that you must be reconciled to give up hope. I mean that you must take heart, and try to be cured. I have known people who could not see at all to be helped, and why not you? At least, you must try.”

An evil mood was upon George Graham, and he answered harshly,—

“Where is the money to come from, if you please? It has been all mother could do just to live and she has struggled on, in the expectation of my being able soon to help her. She has no money for experiments. There is nothing for it but for me to rest a dead weight upon her hands, or—die.”

He said the last word with a sort of gasp. Susie Hale shivered. She drew closer to him. She looked into his poor, tortured face, with her dark and tender eyes, and said very quietly,—

“You believe in God, George Graham, and you will not defy Him. If He means you to bear this you will bear it like a man, and not try to get rid of the burden. But I do not believe He does mean you to bear it; and I will not believe it till every means has been tried for your cure. Just now, it seems to me, you ought to go home. Would you like your mother to hear this first from some one else?”

He rose slowly.

“You are right,” he said, “and you are a good girl. Good-by, Susie.”

She did not try to go with him; she followed him only with her eyes. She was contented if she could but send him home in safety to his mother.

His mother met him at the gate. When she took his hand in hers the poor fellow felt that she knew all. She was very quiet and self-controlled.

“Your teacher has been here,” she said, “and he has told me. My darling, why have you sat in the darkness, and shut your mother out from any share in your trouble?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, mother!” he sobbed, with his head upon her breast, at last,—“I couldn’t, I thought it would break your heart.”

“Ah! that was because you did not know. If you should die and leave me alone in the world, that, indeed, would break my heart; but while I have you beside me, nothing can make me altogether miserable, and nothing must make you so. There is help somewhere, and we will find it, please God; or, if not, we will bear what others have borne, and find a way to lighten the darkness.”

Meantime, Susie Hale had gone home full of an absorbing purpose. Somehow money must and should be raised to try what a skilful oculist could do for George Graham.

Susie was the orphan niece of Deacon Solomon Grant, in whose store a place was awaiting George. She knew that she had a modest little fortune of her own, but it was all in her uncle’s hands, and without his consent she could not dispose even of her slender income. But would he not be persuaded to let her have enough of her own money to accomplish her desire? She asked him, using her utmost power of persuasion to touch his heart, but he refused with peremptory decision. He wouldn’t mind contributing moderately to a fund for young Graham’s help—he would not even mind letting her have five or ten dollars of her own for that purpose—but beyond that the duty of one neighbor did not go. And Deacon Solomon shut his lips together as tightly as he buttoned up his pocket.

Susie had in the world one treasure,—a diamond ring which had been her mother’s, with a stone white and clear as a dew-drop. This must, she knew, be worth three or four hundred dollars. It was her very own. She had meant to keep it all her life for her mother’s sake, but surely this great need of George Graham’s justified her in parting with it.

She had one friend in Boston,—an old teacher,—in whose good faith and judicious management she felt implicit confidence, and to him she sent her mother’s ring, with a request that he would sell it as speedily and on as good terms as possible, and remit her the price of it in bank-notes, not in a check, and keep for ever the secret that she had disposed of it.

It was a week after George Graham had given up hope, when a most unexpected hope came to him. A neighbor, going by from the post-office, handed in at the door a letter addressed to him. Mrs. Graham opened it, for George’s vision had failed with every day, and his eyes were utterly useless now.

“George,” she cried, after a moment, in an eager, trembling voice, “here are three one-hundred dollar bills, and this is the letter that comes with them:—

“‘This money is from a true friend of George Graham’s, and is to be applied to taking him to an oculist, in the hope that his sight may be restored. The giver withholds his name, both because he desires no thanks, and because he wishes to make the return of the money impossible.’

“It is from Heaven, itself!” the mother cried. “George, we will start for Boston to-morrow. I feel in my soul that you are to be cured.”

The next day a mother and her blind son sought rooms at a quiet boarding-house, of which they had found the number in the advertisement column of a city paper, and the day after that they were among the earliest patients of Doctor Annesley. The first examination of George’s eyes was unpromising enough. They would be worse before they were better; an operation might or might not restore sight to them, but the time for it had not yet come. Meanwhile the doctor wanted to see him daily.

Those were weary days and weeks that followed, both before the operation and afterward, when the poor eyes were carefully bandaged from the light, and mother and son sat day after day in the dark together, wondering, wondering, wondering what the result would be. It was curious that the mother was always hopeful, and the son always despairing. At last it almost irritated him to hear her speak of hope to him; and one day he turned on her with the first burst of passionate impatience she had ever experienced from him.

“Mother,” he said, “for the love of Heaven do not talk to me as if it was a sure thing that I am going to see again. I want to think it doubtful, almost impossible. If you should make me expect a sure cure, and then it shouldn’t come, don’t you see that I should go mad? I think I should dash my head against the wall. I can only live by expecting nothing.”

After that the mother held her peace; but whenever she went out of that darkened room those who saw her marvelled at the light of joy in her eyes, the bloom of hope upon her cheeks. At last the time came—the bandage was removed. There was just one wild cry, “Mother, I see you!” and then George Graham lay at the doctor’s feet, swooning and helpless in his great joy.

It was weeks yet before he went home again, but the good news preceded him. The mother wrote it to Deacon Grant, who had agreed still to keep the place in his store open, while awaiting the result of this experiment.

The deacon read the letter in full family conclave, with the slow deliberation of a man unused to correspondence. He little knew how his niece longed to snatch the paper from his hand and read it for herself; nor did he heed the tears that swam in her dark eyes.

Deliberately he smoothed out the letter, and folded it. Deliberately he took off his spectacles, and wiped them, and put them on again. Then he said, with the half pompous, half solemn manner which became his position,—

“Well, well, I’m ready always to rejoice with those that rejoice; and I’m sure I’m thankful that the Widow Graham hasn’t got to struggle with so much trouble as it looked as if Providence was laying on her; but wherever she got that money the Lord knows.”

Another letter came, afterward, to tell when the widow and her son were to return, and to ask Deacon Grant, in whose keeping the key of their house had been left, to put it in their door on that day as he was passing by to the store.

It was Susie who walked over with the key, early in the afternoon, carrying with her a basket of dainties for the travellers’ supper, from Mrs. Grant, a woman who knew how to be a good neighbor, and to make life pleasant with cheap kindnesses. Susie’s black eyes danced, and her heart sang within her as she set the table in the little parlor and lighted a fire in the kitchen stove, ready to make a fresh cup of tea whenever the widow and her son should arrive. Then she dusted every thing; and then she gathered some of the flowers of September,—for already the summer was over,—and put them in the vases on the mantel, and on the widow’s little round sewing-table.

And at last the travellers came, as at last every thing does come, if we wait long enough for it. They had expected to find an empty house; they found instead, warmth and brightness and good cheer and Susie Hale.

DR. JOE’S VALENTINE.

There were half-a-dozen of the girls together,—pretty creatures, in the very first season of their long dresses,—the eldest not quite sixteen. They were all braids and puffs and fluffy curls, all loops and ruffles and ribbons, all smiles and dimples. It was the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, in a certain year of grace, of which I will not give you the precise date, but less than ten years ago, and more than five. Of the half-dozen girls, two are busy teachers now, two are married, one is playing mother to her brother’s little brood of orphan children, and the sixth, not less happy than the rest, has gone on to “the next country,” where they tell us she will never grow old, never be sick or sorry any more,—happy Bertha, whom, surely, God loved.

But, that day in February, none of them thought much about the future: the present was enough, with its fun and frolic, its wealth of all the pleasures which girlhood holds dear. The six were passing the long day together. Two of them were sisters and belonged in one house, and the rest had come there to be with them; for they were all going to make valentines. They had made funny ones and foolish ones, tender ones, with just a little dash of satire in them, poetic ones and prosy ones; and at last it was dinner-time, a feast of all the things that school-girls love, and these were hungry girls. At least they were all hungry girls but Nelly Hunt, and she scarcely ate any dinner at all, she was so busy thinking. She was Bertha’s sister, and this was her home and Bertha’s, and it was to the girls’ own room that the little party went back again, after they had eaten and praised Mrs. Hunt’s dinner.

“What are you thinking about, Nell?” Bertha asked, sitting on the arm of Nelly’s chair.

“These valentines,” Nelly answered slowly.

“Well, surely they need not make you sober,—they are absurd enough.”

“Yes, and it’s just because they are so absurd that they make me sober. I was wondering why we couldn’t just as well have said something to help somebody—to make somebody think—to do some good.”

“Nelly’s heroics!” cried Kate Greene flippantly. “Miss Hunt as a moral reformer!”

Nelly blushed from her pretty ears to the roots of her sunny hair; but her eyes shone clear, and there was a ring of earnestness in her voice as she answered,—

“You can laugh if you will, but I mean what I say, and I’m going to try an experiment. I will write one boy a valentine, such as I think a girl ought to write, and I’ll send it.”

“So you shall,” Bertha said gently,—Bertha always was peacemaker,—“and we’ll all go away and see mamma and the baby while you write it. When it’s done you must call us.”

“Yes, and you must show it to us,” cried Kate Greene, as she went away; “that’s only fair. We promised this morning to show each other all we sent, and we sha’n’t let you off.”

And then the five fluttered away like a flock of birds, and Nelly was quite alone.

Her task was harder than she had imagined. It is only the old, perhaps, who are sage in counsel by nature. At any rate, to give good advice did not come naturally to pretty Nelly. But she had an idea of what she wanted to say, and at last she got it said. She had written and rewritten it, and finally concluded that she could do no better, and then copied it out into her neatest handwriting before she called the others. It was a little stiff, to be sure, and preachy and high-flown, but it sounded like a lofty effort and a complete success to the listening girls. This was what it said:—

“My Valentine,—You will have plenty of fine speeches and praises, and, perhaps, of fun and fancy from others, so I shall not give you those,—I who have but one interest in you, namely, that you should be the best boy and the best man which it is possible for you to become. If you are selfish, if you are indolent, if you are mean, you will never be happy in your own society, until you have sunk so low that you don’t know the difference between goodness and badness. But if you set out to be a gentleman and a man of honor and a faithful worker, you will do good deeds and live a happy life, and be worthy the everlasting esteem of

Your Valentine.”

Nelly Reading her Valentine.—Page 220.

Nelly read it with rising color and a little quiver about her mouth, which Bertha understood; but she read it with firm voice and careful, deliberate accent.

“Then,” she said, when she had finished, “I shall burn up all the rest of my valentines, and send only this one; for it is what I mean, in earnest, and, as old Aunty Smoke says, ‘Ef it don’t do no good, it can’t do no harm.’”

“To whom shall you send it, dear?” Bertha asked gently, a little subdued by Nelly’s epistolary success.

“I hadn’t made up my mind,” Nelly answered thoughtfully; “they all need it.”

“O, send it to Joe, my cousin Joe,” cried Kitty Greene. “He is staying with us, and he needs it—bad enough. If ever a boy was full of his pranks, Joe is, and if ever a boy tormented a girl’s life out, Joe does mine.”

A color clear and bright as flame glowed on Nelly Hunt’s cheeks. Had she had dark-eyed Joe in her mind all the while? She only answered very quietly,—

“I don’t mind. I had just as lief send it to Joe. That is, I’ll send it to him if you’ll promise, on your sacred honor, never in any way to let him know who wrote it.”

“Oh, I will—true as I live and breathe I’ll never tell him, and never let him guess, if I can help it.”

“And all you girls?” Nelly asked, with the pretty pink glow deepening in her cheeks. “Will you all promise?”

And they all promised; for there was a sort of honest earnestness in Nelly’s nature to which they found it natural to yield.

So the valentine was directed in Nelly’s most neat and proper manner to “Mr. Joe Greene,” and was dropped into the post-office with the rest of the valentines the girls had written that day.

On the fifteenth the six girls were all together at school, comparing notes and exchanging confidences. But Kitty Greene drew Nelly aside, and said, while they walked up and down the hall together, their arms around each other as girls will,—

“I saw Joe get it, Nelly.”

Nelly’s pretty cheeks glowed and her eyes shone like stars, but she asked no questions. Indeed, they were scarcely necessary, for Kitty was eager enough to tell her story.

“He got it, don’t you think, along with half-a-dozen others, and he read them all before he came to this one. I knew this, you know, by the shape of the envelope. When he came to it I saw him read it all through, and then I saw him go back and read it again. I heard him say to himself,—

“‘That’s an honest letter from some little saint.’

“Then he came up to me and held it toward me, while I pretended to be very busy with my valentines. Then he asked,—

“‘Do you know that handwriting, Kit?’

“I felt like an awful little liar, but I had promised you. I stretched out my hand for it, and said carelessly,—

“‘Why, ain’t it Sue’s?’

“Sue is his sister, you know. So he thought I did not know who it came from, and he changed his mind, and put it into his pocket, and went off. When I teased him afterward to let me see it, he said,—

“‘No; there are some things a fellow would be a cad to show.’

“So I saw it hit home, and well it might. It was a tremendous letter, Nelly.”

And Kitty ended with a hug and a kiss, and a look of that loyal admiration which a girl can give another girl now and then.

When the spring came Joe Greene went away from Chester, and did not come back there any more. No doubt Nelly Hunt would have forgotten his very existence but for the valentine, which she could not forget. She used to blush, as she grew older, to think how “bumptious” it was, as she used to call it to herself. What was she, that she should have undertaken to preach a sermon to that boy? What if he remembered it only to think how presuming it was, and to laugh at it? But, luckily, he did not know from whom it came; and with that thought she cooled her blushes.

Nelly was twenty when Joe Greene came back to Chester again. And now he came as a physician, just through his studies, and anxious to build up a practice. Soon his fame grew. His patients were among the poor at first, and he cured them; and then richer people heard of it, and sent for him. But, while he took all the patients that came, he never gave up his practice among those who most needed him. His praise was in all their mouths. There had never been any doctor like this one.

Nelly was Miss Hunt now, for Bertha had gone away from her into the other, unknown country, and Nelly’s grief had made her gentle heart yet more gentle, and her helpful spirit yet more helpful.

Toward night, one summer day, she had gone to see an old woman who had been her nurse once, and had found her very ill,—quite too ill to be left alone, and certainly in need of a physician. So Nelly tore a leaf from her memorandum-book and wrote on it a few lines, begging Dr. Greene to come at once, and then called to the first passer-by and entreated him to take it to the doctor.

It was scarcely half an hour before Dr. Greene came in, quietly and gravely. He attended to his patient with that careful consideration which made all those poor souls whom he visited adore him. Then he turned to Nelly.

“Who will stay with her to-night?” he asked; “for, indeed, she hardly ought to be left alone.”

“I shall stay,” was the quiet answer.

“Then come to the door with me, please, and let me give you your directions.”

Nelly followed, and stood there, in the soft summer dusk,—a pretty picture, with the wild-rose flush dawning in her cheeks, and a new light kindling her eyes. She listened carefully to all his injunctions, and then turned as if to go. But he put out a hand to detain her.

“How very much I owe to you!” he said.

“You, how?” And a deep, deep crimson dyed Nelly’s face and throat. In that moment she thought of her “bumptious” valentine, which had not crossed her mind before for a long time.

He looked at her with a smile in his eyes, but with a face that preserved all its respectful gravity. He took a red leather case out of his pocket, and from the case he took the very old valentine which Nelly remembered so well. Then he produced the brief note she had written that afternoon; and still there was light enough left in the day to see them by, as he held them side by side.

“Your hand has matured somewhat since this valentine was written,” he remarked quietly; “but some of these letters I should know anywhere. No one could deceive me.”

“I did not suppose you had kept that foolish thing,” Nelly said, with a pitiful little quiver in her voice, as if she were just on the point of bursting into tears. “I am so ashamed!”

Dr. Joe looked at her a moment, as she stood there in the waning light,—a lovely, graceful girl from whom any man might be proud to win even a passing interest. So this was the woman, the thought of whom he had carried in his heart for years! If he had ever done any good thing, he was paid for it in the satisfaction of that hour.

“Are you sorry,” he asked slowly, “that you have helped one man to be his best self? Those words of yours were to me like the voice of my inmost soul. Since then this paper has never left me, nor have I ever ceased to strive to be worthy of the esteem of my unknown ‘valentine.’ If ever I have been generous instead of selfish, brave instead of cowardly, strong instead of weak, it has been because I have remembered the words written here, and meant to live in their spirit. Are you sorry for that? or do you grudge me the dear pleasure of thanking you?”

“No, I’m not sorry, nor do I grudge you any thing; but it was a girl’s freak, and I am not worthy of so much praise and honor.”

“It was a good girl’s good intention,” he said almost solemnly. “Let us be thankful that it succeeded.”

Nelly went back to the bedside of the old woman with a fluttering heart. How strange it seemed to think this sick woman was old enough to have outlived all anxieties except those about her pains and her supper! Had not she been young once? and had no one ever looked at her as Dr. Joe looked?

The next morning he came again. His medicine, a night’s sleep, Nelly’s care,—something seemed to have given the poor old patient a fresh lease of life. There was no need that Nelly should stay with her any more; but she went to see her daily, and it was curious how often Dr. Joe’s visits happened at the same time.

One night the doctor had left his horse at home, and he and Nelly walked away together. They talked about the lingering sunset and the soft south wind and even the old woman; for Nelly, woman-like, was struggling desperately to keep Dr. Joe from saying what she desperately wanted to hear. But, at last, it came,—a half-blunt, half-awkward speech, yet with Dr. Joe’s honest heart in it,—

“I’ve lived all these years just to earn your esteem, and now I find I don’t care a thing about that unless I can also win your love.”

I think Nelly’s answer must have satisfied him, for she is Mrs. Joseph Greene now; and that valentine—worn and old, but choicely framed—always hangs over the doctor’s study table.

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