y God guide and sustain me," he cried, pausing and looking upward.

"May I go, sir?" asked Mittie, who had been watching her father's
varying countenance, and felt somewhat awed by the deep solemnity and
sadness that settled upon it. Her manner, if not affectionate was
respectful, and he dismissed her with a gleaming hope that the clue to
her heart's labyrinth--that labyrinth which seemed now closed with an
immovable rock, might yet be discovered.

CHAPTER IV.

"Oh, wanton malice! deathful sport!
Could ye not spare my all?
But mark my words, on thy cold heart
A fiery doom will fall."

The incident recorded in the last chapter, resulted in benefit to two of
the actors. It gave a spring to the dormant energies of Helen, and a
check to the vengeance of Mittie.

The winter glided imperceptibly away, and as imperceptibly vernal bloom
and beauty stole over the face of nature.

In the spring of the year, Miss Thusa always engaged in a very
interesting process--that is, bleaching the flaxen thread which she had
been spinning during the winter. She now made a permanent home at Mr.
Gleason's, and superintended the household concerns, pursuing at the
same time the occupation to which she had devoted the strength and
intensity of her womanhood.

There was a beautiful grassy lawn extending from the southern side of
the building, with a gradual slope towards the sun, whose margin was
watered by the clearest, bluest, gayest little singing brook in the
world. This was called Miss Thusa's bleaching ground, and nature seemed
to have laid it out for her especial use. There was the smooth, fresh,
green sward, all ready for her to lay her silky brown thread upon, and
there was the pure water running by, where she could fill her watering
pot, morning, noon and night, and saturate the fibres exposed to the
sun's bleaching rays. And there was a thick row of blossoming lilac
bushes shading the lower windows the whole breadth of the building, in
which innumerable golden and azure-colored birds made their nests, and
beguiled the spinster's labors with their melodious carrolings.

Helen delighted in assisting Miss Thusa in watering her thread, and
watching the gradual change from brown to a pale brown, and then to a
silver gray, melting away into snowy whiteness, like the bright brown
locks of youth, fading away into the dim hoariness of age. When weary of
dipping water from the wimpling brook, she would sit u