e, but yet had been used to wake to a consciousness of
little pains and troubles, such as even to her meekness were sometimes
hard to bear. But on this morning there were none of these. She lay in a
kind of hush of happiness and ease, not caring to make any further
movement, lingering over the sweet sensation of that waking. She had no
desire to move nor to break the spell of the silence and peace. It was
still very early, she supposed, and probably it might be hours yet before
any one came to call her. It might even be that she should sleep again.
She had no wish to move, she lay at such luxurious ease and calm. But by
and by, as she came to full possession of her waking senses, it appeared
to her that there was some change in the atmosphere, in the scene. There
began to steal into the air about her, the soft dawn as of a summer
morning, the lovely blueness of the first opening of daylight before the
sun. It could not be the light of the moon, which she had seen before she
went to bed; and all was so still, that it could not be the bustling,
wintry day which comes at that time of the year late, to find the world
awake before it. This was different; it was like the summer dawn, a soft
suffusion of light growing every moment. And by and by it occurred to
her that she was not in the little room where she had lain down. There
were no dim walls or roof, her little pictures were all gone, the
curtains at her window. The discovery gave her no uneasiness in that
delightful calm. She lay still to think of it all, to wonder, yet
undisturbed. It half amused her that these things should be changed, but
did not rouse her yet with any shock of alteration. The light grew fuller
and fuller round, growing into day, clearing her eyes from the sweet mist
of the first waking. Then she raised herself upon her arm. She was not in
her room, she was in no scene she knew. Indeed it was scarcely a scene at
all, nothing but light, so soft and lovely, that it soothed and caressed
her eyes. She thought all at once of a summer morning when she was a
child, when she had woke in the deep night which yet was day, early, so
early that the birds were scarcely astir, and had risen up with a
delicious sense of daring and of being all alone in the mystery of the
sunrise, in the unawakened world which lay at her feet to be explored, as
if she were Eve just entering upon Eden. It was curious how all those
childish sensations, long forgotten, came back to her as