"Oh! Uncle, it made my heart bleed to see Sophy sitting there so wretched, so hopeless; she who had always been so full of bright expectations! She used to build such castles in the air when she and I sat gossipping together. Oh I to think of those days!" sighed Norah. "Poor Sophy seemed really to hope that she would be a lady at last; she delighted to fancy what she would do, and how she would dress, and where she would go, and what grand friends she would have! It was so amusing to hear her, and she talked of such things till I almost think that she began to believe that all would really come true. Alas! What an end to her hopes!"
"A very common end to such hopes," observed Franks; "they are like the garlands which such young lasses twine for their heads in May; gay enough in the morning, withered and dying in the evening, flung away at night. We need something stronger and more lasting, Norah, to cover the head in the long, hard battle of life. We want 'a hope' that 'maketh not ashamed.' * It is only religion that can give it; it is the Christian alone that can wear 'for a helmet the hope of salvation.'"
* Rom. v. 5.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
SUCCESS.
Norah was surprised on answering the door-bell on the morning of the following Sunday to find her uncle standing without.
"Why, uncle, who would have thought to have seen you so early? and your face looks so bright, as if you were bringing good news!" cried the girl.
"Maybe my face speaks the truth," answered the sailor, gaily, stamping to free his boots from the snow which had gathered upon them. "I thought that my little lass would go to church with a lighter heart, if I stepped over early to tell her what I heard yesterday evening when I looked in at old Meade's."
"Something about Sophy," cried the eager Norah.
"Ay, ay; what your friend Miss Persis told me, as well as she could spin her yarn between the good old gentleman's kind inquiries about my hand," replied Ned Franks with a laugh: "She kept her promise of speaking to Mrs. Lane about poor blind Sophy, and the lady took quite an interest in the story which, I'll be bound, was not marred in the telling. The long and short of it is, that the lady is able to put your poor young friend into the asylum, and she took Persis, I mean Miss Meade, in her own carriage to the workhouse, that she might carry the good news to Sophy herself."