, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing bell."

My long separation from my father was at length drawing to a close. He
spoke hopefully of his return to England, and even named the vessel in
which he intended to take his passage. "Shall I find my girl much
altered, I wonder?" he wrote. "Taller, no doubt, and I hope wiser, but
in heart just the same as when she left me, and with as tender a corner
as ever for her poor old dad." I made so many plans for Father's return.
All my best sketches and collections were put by to show to him, and I
toiled hard at music, so that he might not be disappointed with my
playing. I thought how I would introduce Cathy to him, and how much he
would admire her, and how perhaps we could go and stay somewhere near
Marshlands in the holidays, so that he could see all the Winstanleys
together. I imagined him coming to our Mid-summer breaking-up party, and
how proud and happy I should be to have him there. It was an annual
occasion to which the parents and friends of the girls were invited, and
I had often felt, with a little pang, when I saw the warm greetings
between others, that it seemed hard to have no one there to love me
specially above everyone else. At last I was to have my own dear one all
to myself, and I counted the days till his return, crossing each off on
the calendar when I went to bed at night, and thinking that I was one
day nearer to our meeting. Now that his arrival seemed so close, I was
full of impatience, and felt that the time would scarcely pass, and I
wondered sometimes how I had managed to live through those five long
years without him.

He was to sail in the _Ignacia_, a Spanish vessel bound for London, and
the steamer was cabled to have started on her voyage. Each night I
thought of Father tossing on the ocean, and each morning when I awoke, I
pictured him a little nearer to me than when I had fallen asleep. I was
so excited I could scarcely attend to my lessons, and the teachers,
knowing my story, did not press me too hard. And so the weeks passed by,
and the great day of my happiness drew near.

I was sitting one afternoon at my drawing class. It was early June, and
the windows were wide open, letting in the fragrant scent of the lilac
and hawthorn from the garden below, and the imperative song of a
chaffinch to his mate in the elm-tree close by. Sometimes, in memory of
greater events, little incidents make