how he grew pale and trembled, I felt that Nellie was
not altogether blameless. But he breathed no word of censure against
her; and when, a year or two afterward, I saw her given to William
Raymond, I knew that the love of two hearts was hers; the one to
cherish and watch over her, the other to love and worship, silently,
secretly, as a miser worships his hidden treasure.

* * * * *

The bridal was over. The farewells were over, and Nellie had
gone--gone from the home whose sunlight she had made, and which she
had left forever. Sadly the pale, sick mother wept, and mourned her
absence, listening in vain for the light footfall and soft, ringing
voice she would never hear again.

Three weeks had passed away, and then, far and near the papers teemed
with accounts of the horrible Norwalk catastrophe, which desolated
many a home, and wrung from many a heart its choicest treasure. Side
by side they found them--Nellie and her husband--the light of her
brown eyes quenched forever, and the pulses of his heart still in
death!

I was present when they told the poor invalid of her loss, and even
now I seem to hear the bitter, wailing cry which broke from her white
lips, as she begged them to unsay what they had said, and tell her
Nellie was not dead--that she would come back again.

It could not be. Nellie would never return; and in six weeks' time the
broken-hearted mother was at rest with her child.

THE THANKSGIVING PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

CHAPTER I.

NIGHT BEFORE THANKSGIVING.

"Oh, I do hope it will be pleasant to-morrow," said Lizzie Dayton, as
on the night before Thanksgiving she stood at the parlor window,
watching a dense mass of clouds, behind which the sun had lately gone
to his nightly rest.

"I hope so, too," said Lucy, coming forward and joining her sister;
"but then it isn't likely it will be. There has been a big circle
around the moon these three nights, and besides that, I never knew it
fail to storm when I was particularly anxious that it should be
pleasant;" and the indignant beauty pouted very becomingly at the
insult so frequently offered by that most capricious of all things,
the weather.

"Thee shouldn't talk so, Lucy," said Grandma Dayton, who was of Quaker
descent, at the same time holding up between herself and the window
the long stocking which she was knitting. "Doesn't thee know that when
thee is finding fault with the weather thee finds