the hand which planted it; and I
loved to sit on the waving grass and listen to the soft summer wind
stealing through it, rustling among the dry blades and whispering with
the green ones.

There was one sentence that fell from my mother's dying lips which ever
came to me in the sighs of the gale, fraught with mournful mystery.
"Because man was _false_, I dared to think God was unjust." And had she
not adjured me by every precious and every solemn consideration, "to
forgive the _living_, if living _he_ indeed was?"

I knew these words referred to my father; and what a history of wrong
and sorrow was left for my imagination to fill up! Living!--my father
living! Oh! there is no grave so deep as that dug by the hand of neglect
or desertion! He had been dead to my mother,--he had been dead to me. I
shuddered at the thought of breathing the same vital element. He who had
broken a mother's heart must be a fiend, worthy of eternal abhorrence.

"If you live to years of womanhood," said my expiring mother, "and your
heart awakens to love, as alas for woman's destiny it will, then read my
life's sad experience, and be warned by my example."

Sad prophetess! Death has consecrated thy prediction, but it is yet
unfulfilled. When will womanhood commence, on whose horizon the morning
star of love is to rise in clouded lustre?

Surely I am invested with a woman's dignity, in that great arm-chair,
behind the green-covered desk. I feel very much like a blown rose,
surrounded by the rose-bud garland of childhood. Yet Dr. Harlowe calls
me "little girl," and Mr. Regulus "my child," when the pupils are not
by; then it is "Miss Gabriella." They forget that I am sixteen, and that
I have grown taller and more womanly in the last year; but the awakening
heart has not yet throbbed at its dawning destiny, the day-star of love
has not risen on its slumbers.

CHAPTER XIII.

"I wish you had a vacation too," said Richard Clyde, as we ascended
together the winding hill.

"Then we should not have these pleasant walks," I answered.

"Why not?"

"Why, I should not be returning from school at this hour every day, and
you would not happen to overtake me as you do now."

"How do you know it is accident, Gabriella? How do you know but I wander
about the woods, a restless ghost, till glad ringing voices chiming
together, announce that you are free, and that I am at liberty to play
guardian and knight, as I did three or four years ago?"