th
something more divinely awful than anger, and with levelled lance it
assailed that evil Presence and bore it to the ground; but the Shadow
slipped aside from the spear, and cowered into distance; the angelic
face saddened, and, stooping downward, folded Sunny in its arms as if to
bear her away.

Roger woke with his own vain attempt to grasp and detain the child. The
setting sun streamed in at the window, and his mother stood at his side,
brought by some inarticulate sound from Sunny's lips.

She sent the boy to call his father, and when they came in together, the
child's wide blue eyes were open, full of supernatural calm; her parched
lips parted with a faint smile; and the loose golden curls pushed off
her forehead, where the blue veins crept, like vivid stains of violet,
under the clear skin.

"Dear mother!" she said, raising her arms slowly, to be lifted on the
pillow; but the low, hoarse voice had lost its music.

Then she turned to her father with that strange bright smile, and again
to Roger, uttering faintly,--

"Stand away, Roger; Sunny wants the light."

They drew all the curtain opposite her bed away, and, as she stretched
her hands eagerly toward the window, the last rays of sunshine glowed
on her pale illuminated face, till it was even as an angel's, and Roger
caught a sudden gleam of wings across the air; but a cold pain struck
him as he gazed, for Sunny fell backward on her pillow. She had gone
with the sunshine.

It seemed now for a time as if the phantasm that haunted Roger Pierce
were banished at last. His moody reserve disappeared; he addressed
himself with quiet, constant effort to console his mother,--to aid his
father,--to fill, so far as he could, the vacant place; and his heart
longed with an incessant thirst for the bright Spirit that hovered in
his dream over Sunny;--he seemed almost to have begun a natural and
healthy life.

But year after year passed away, and the light of Sunny's influence
faded with her fading memory. Green turf grew over her short grave, and
the long slant shadow of its headstone no longer lay on a foot-worn
track. Roger's pilgrimages to that spot were over; his heart had ceased
to remember. The Shadow had reassumed its power, and reigned.

Still through its obscurity he kept one gleam of light,--an admiration
undiminished for those who seemed to have no such attendance; but daily
the number of these grew less.

At length, after the studies of his youth were