--had not blessed her always. She remembered the time when it was not
there.

"Alas! that I should have been, even to them, a burden--a punishment!"
cried the girl, in the first outburst of suffering, which became ten
times keener, because concealed. Her vivid fancy even exaggerated the
truth. She saw in herself a poor deformed being, shut out from all
natural ties--a woman, to whom friendship would be given but in kindly
pity; to whom love--that blissful dream in which she had of late
indulged--would be denied for evermore. How hard seemed her doom! If it
were for months only, or even years; but, to bear for a whole life this
withering ban--never to be freed from it, except through death! And her
lips unconsciously repeated the bitter murmur, "O God! why hast thou
made me thus?"

It was scarcely uttered before her heart trembled at its impiety. And
then the current of her thoughts changed. Those mysterious yearnings
which had haunted her throughout childhood, until they had grown fainter
under the influence of earthly ties and pleasures, returned to her now.
God's immeasurable Infinite rose before her in glorious serenity. What
was one brief lifetime to the ages of eternity? She felt it: she, in her
weakness--her untaught childhood--her helplessness--felt that her poor
deformed body enshrined a living soul. A soul that could look on Heaven,
and on whom Heaven also looked--not like man, with scorn or loathing,
but with a Divine tenderness that had power to lift the mortal into
communion with the immortal.

Olive Rothesay seemed to have grown years older in that hour of solitary
musing. She walked homewards through the silent fields, over which the
early night was falling--night coming, as it were, in the midst of day,
where the only light was given by the white, cold snow. To Olive this
was a symbol, too--a token that the freezing sorrow which had fallen on
her path might palely light her on her earthly way. Strange things for
a young girl to dream of! But they whom Heaven teaches are sometimes
called--Samuel-like--while to them still pertains the childish ephod and
the temple-porch.

Passing on, with footsteps silent and solemn as her own heart, Olive
came to the street, on the verge of the town, where was her own dwelling
and Sara's. From habit she looked in at the Derwents' house. It had
all the cheerful brightness given by a blazing fire, glimmering through
windows not yet closed. Olive could plainly distinguish