night, while watching
with her--the nurse had been sent to bed--he suddenly said: "How much
your child resembles you. Just now, in this dim light, when you stooped
over her and the little girl looked up to you with that peculiarly
spiritual and precocious expression which illness gives, I could almost
have fancied that you were sisters. Ten years hence, she will be your
very image." "Perhaps you are right," answered the young mother, "but
the resemblance is only outward: all her mental qualities she inherits
from her father. I often wonder at so great a likeness in such a young
child, and _that_ too a girl. Her truthfulness her self-denial, her
courage often make me feel as if my lost husband had been given back to
me in this child."

"You are mentioning qualities, which during our short acquaintance, I
have remarked that you possess in a high degree."

She shook her head, "If I seem courageous, it is only owing to my
natural cowardice. When you first saw me I was quite broken-hearted
with misery, and anxiety, but I dared not give vent to my feelings, for
I knew that I should break down utterly at the sound of my own voice.
My husband could look the most fearful events calmly in the face; and
so it is with the child. He could make any sacrifice without thinking
of himself."

"And you; I should think, you did not spare yourself in the first days
of this trial."

"A mother's heart feels no sacrifice," she answered, "but before my
child was born I often had to strive with myself, and force myself to
do what was distasteful to me for the sake of others. It is not so with
the child, though youth generally is, and well may be, the season for
egotism. I could tell you a hundred traits of her excellent
disposition. I have often felt anxious about her, for so precocious a
tenderness of feeling is said to be the presage of a short life. Who
can tell whether it may not be realized."

Everhard looked out on the lake, and seemed not to have heard her last
words. Suddenly he said; "you have probably a portrait of your husband:
Will you show it to me?"

She took off a delicately worked Venetian chain, which she wore round
her neck, opened the locket which was fastened to it, and handed it to
him.

He gazed at it for several minutes, and then silently gave it back to
her. After a long pause he said, "Was it a youthful attachment?"

"Not quite what is generally so called. I was, certainly very young
when I made his acquaintan