es, which worked with painful and scarcely suppressed emotion.
The father started back on beholding her. "My child!" he exclaimed,
"what is the matter?"

"Leave me alone, father, I entreat of you!" she said.

"Not till you tell me what is distressing you so," said he, chafing her
cold hands in his. "Is this engagement so repulsive, so averse to your
feelings, as to cause this appearance of agony and distress?"

But she only said, "Leave me, dear father, I entreat you, for a while! I
have a sudden illness. By and by I will speak to you."

Awed by her tone and manner, the fond father obeyed. An hour passed by,
during which the grief-stricken girl never moved, when the door opened,
and Hannah Doliver entered. She glowered on Florence with an expression
of hate and gratified revenge, which changed to one of fawning fondness
when the pale, tear-stained face was turned toward her. "Pray, don't sit
here in the cold all day!" said she. "Your mother desires you to come to
her."

Florence wrapped her rich dressing-gown around her, stole down the
stairs and entered the apartment of the invalid, who reached her wasted
arm from the bed as she approached, and clasped it round the slender,
graceful waist. The young girl bowed her head on the pillow, and burst
into tears.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"He held a letter in his withered hand
Which brought good tidings of the absent one.
O, what soul-cheering things are letters, when
They come fresh from the hand of one we love,
All brimming o'er with kindly-uttered words!"

The wailing winds swept onward with low and piteous sound, while the
"Hermit of the Cedars" sat beneath his humble roof, beside a rough
table, and, by the light of a tallow candle, pored over a
closely-written page. In the recess of the small window, a bright-haired
boy was sitting, very like the dreamy Edgar who sat there in summers and
seasons passed by, and watched the stars gleaming, like showers of
diamonds, through the interlacing forest-boughs. But it was not Edgar,
for he was far away, storing his mind from the mines of ancient lore.

It was our little friend, Willie Danforth, the washerwoman's boy, for
whom the hermit had taken a large fancy since Edgar left him, and often
coaxed him from his mother to pass a few nights at the hut in the
forest. Willie, as we see him now, in the place where we were wont to
behold Edg