e forgave me, and loved me
just the same and went to sleep with my name on his lips. I can see it
there now, the formation of the word Lucy, and it will be the first he
utters when he welcomes me to heaven, if I am permitted to enter there.

"I have made this confession because I thought I ought, that you might
not think me better than I am, I know you will despise me, but it does
not matter; Robbie forgave and loved me to the last, and that alone will
keep me from going mad."

She ceased speaking, and with a low, gasping sob fell forward into the
arms of her father, who had stepped to her side in time to receive her.

It was a blustering March day when they buried Robert Grey in the
cemetery at Allington, while his sister, who had been taken directly
from the church to her home, lay unconscious in her room, only moaning
occasionally, and whispering of Robbie, whose eyes she had put out.

"People will hate me always," she said, when after weeks of brain fever
she was herself again. But in this she was mistaken, for the people who
knew her best loved her most, and as the years went on, and all felt the
influence of her pure, stainless, unselfish life, they came to esteem
her as almost a saint, and no house was complete which had not in it
some likeness of the sad, but inexpressibly sweet face which had a smile
for every one, and which was oftenest seen in the cheerless houses where
hunger and sickness were. There Lucy Grey was a ministering angel, and
the good she did could never be told in words, but was known and felt by
those who never breathed a prayer which did not have in it a thought of
her and a wish for her happiness.

When Grey was first laid in her arms, and she saw in his great blue eyes
a look like those other eyes hidden beneath the coffin-lid, she felt as
if Robbie had come back to her, and there awoke within her a love for
the child greater even than his own mother felt for him. And yet, so
wholly unselfish was her nature that she never mourned or uttered a word
of protest when, as the boy grew older, he evinced a preference for the
farm-house in the pasture, rather than for the grand old place at Grey's
Park, where, since her sister's marriage and her father's death, she had
lived alone.

"Hannah needs him more than I do," she would say to herself, but her
sweet face was always brighter, and in her great black eyes there was a
softer light when she knew he was coming to break the monotony of her
lo