Mrs. Rossitur was silent.
“Don’t you get up to uncle Rolf’s
breakfast to-morrow, aunt Lucy.”
“Nor you.”
“I sha’n’t unless I want to—but
there’ll be nothing for you to do, and you must
just lie still. We will all have our breakfast
together when Charlton has his.”
“You are the veriest sunbeam that ever came
into a house,” said her aunt kissing her.
My flagging soul flies under her own pitch.
Dryden.
Fleda mused as she went up stairs whether the sun
were a luminous body to himself or no, feeling herself
at that moment dull enough. Bright, was she,
to others? nothing seemed bright to her. Every
old shadow was darker than ever. Her uncle’s
unchanged gloom,—her aunt’s unrested
face,—Hugh’s unaltered delicate sweet
look, which always to her fancy seemed to write upon
his face, “Passing away!”—and
the thickening prospects whence sprang the miasm that
infected the whole moral atmosphere—alas,
yes!—“Money is a good thing,”
thought Fleda;—“and poverty need not
be a bad thing, if people can take it right;—but
if they take it wrong!—”
With a very drooping heart indeed she went to the
window. Her old childish habit had never been
forgotten; whenever the moon or the stars were abroad
Fleda rarely failed to have a talk with them from her
window. She stood there now, looking out into
the cold still night, with eyes just dimmed with tears—not
that she lacked sadness enough, but she did lack spirit
enough to cry. It was very still;—after
the rattle and confusion of the city streets, that
extent of snow-covered country where the very shadows
were motionless—the entire absence of soil
and of disturbance—the rest of nature—the
breathlessness of the very wind—all preached
a quaint kind of sermon to Fleda. By the force
of contrast they told her what should be;—and
there was more yet,—she thought that by
the force of example they shewed what might be.
Her eyes had not long travelled over the familiar
old fields and fences before she came to the conclusion
that she was home in good time,—she thought
she had been growing selfish, or in danger of it;
and she made up her mind she was glad to be back again
among the rough things of life, where she could do
so much to smooth them for others and her own spirit
might grow to a polish it would never gain in the
regions of ease and pleasure. “To do life’s
work!”—thought Fleda clasping her
hands,—“no matter where—and
mine is here. I am glad I am in my place again—I
was forgetting I had one.”
