“You must tell her, Beatrice, that I was as undisciplined as she is now.  Tell her how I have come to rejoice in the great affliction of my life:  how little I knew how to bear it when Frederick was taken from me and his children, in the prime of his health and strength.  You remember how crushed to the ground I was, and how it was said that my life was saved chiefly by the calmness that came with the full belief that I was dying.  And O! how my spirit rebelled when I found myself recovering!  Do you remember the first day I went to Church to return thanks?”

“It was after we were gone home.”

“Ah! yes.  I had put it off longer than I ought, because I felt so utterly unable to join in the service.  The sickness of heart that came with those verses of thanksgiving!  All I could do was to pray to be forgiven for not being able to follow them.  Now I can own with all my heart the mercy that would not grant my blind wish for death.  My treasure was indeed in heaven, but O! it was not the treasure that was meant.  I was forgetting my mother, and so selfish and untamed was I, that I was almost forgetting my poor babies!  Yes, tell her this, Beatrice, and tell her that, if duties and happiness sprang up all around me, forlorn and desolate as I thought myself, so much the more will they for her; and ‘at evening time there shall be light.’  Tell her that I look to her for guiding and influencing Fred. She must never let a week pass without writing to him, and she must have the honoured office of waiting on the old age of her grandfather and grandmother.  I think she will be a comfort to them, do not you?  They are fond of her, and she seems to suit them.”

“Yes, I have little doubt that she will be everything to them.  I have especially noted her ways with Mrs. Langford, they are so exactly what I have tried to teach Beatrice.”

“Dear little Busy Bee!  I am glad she is coming; but in case I should not see her, give her her godmother’s love, and tell her that she and Henrietta must be what their mammas have been to each other; and that I trust that after thirty-five years’ friendship, they will still have as much confidence in one another as I have in you, my own dear Beatrice.  I have written her name in one of these books,” she added after a short interval, touching some which were always close to her.  “And, Beatrice, one thing more I had to say,” she proceeded, taking up a Bible, and finding out a place in it.  “Geoffrey has always been a happy prosperous man, as he well deserves; but if ever trouble should come to him in his turn, then show him this.”  She pointed out the verse, “Be as a father to the fatherless, and instead of a husband to their mother; so shalt thou be as the son of the Most High, and He shall love thee more than thy mother doth.”  “Show him that, and tell him it is his sister Mary’s last blessing.”

CHAPTER XVIII.