Fashion and Famine

by Ann S. Stephens

Little Julia Warren had given a very correct description of the house to which she had been so strangely conveyed. Grand, imposing, and unsurpassed for magnificence by anything known in our city, it was nevertheless filled with a sort of gorgeous gloom that fell like a weight upon the beholder. Most of the shutters were closed, and where the glass was not painted, rich draperies muffled and tinted the light wherever it penetrated a crevice, or struggled through the reversed fold of a blind.

As you passed through those sumptuous rooms, so vast, so still, it seemed like traversing a flower-garden by the faintest starlight; you knew that beautiful objects lay around you on every side, without the power of distinguishing them, save in shadowy masses. All this indistinctness took a strong hold on the imagination, rendered more powerful, perhaps, by the profound stillness that reigned in the dwelling.

Since the great front door had fallen softly to its latch after the little girl left the building, no sound had broken the intense hush that surrounded it. Still the lady, who had so marvelously impressed herself upon the heart of that child, lay prone upon the couch in her boudoir in the second story. She was the only living being in that whole dwelling, and but for the quick breath that now and then disturbed her bosom, she appeared lifeless as the marble Flora that seemed scattering lilies over the cushion where she rested.

After a time the stillness seemed to startle her. She lifted her head and looked around the room.

"Gone!" she said, in a tone of disappointment, which had something of impatience in it—"gone!"

The lady started up, pale and with an imperious motion, as one whose faintest wish had seldom been opposed. She approached a window, and flinging back the curtains of azure damask, cast another searching look over the room. But the pale, sweet features of the Flora smiling down upon her lilies, was the only semblance to a human being that met her eye. She dropped the curtain impatiently. The statue seemed mocking her with its cold, classic smile. It suited her better when the wind came with a sweep, dashing the rain-drops fiercely against the window.

The irritation which this sound produced on her nerves seemed to animate her with a keen wish to find the child who had disappeared so noiselessly. She went to the door, traversed the hall and the great stair-case; and her look grew almost wild when she found no signs of the little girl! Two or three times she parted her lips, as if to call out; but the name that she would have uttered clung to her heart, and the parted lips gave forth no sound.

It was strange that a name, buried in her bosom for years, unuttered, hidden as the miser hides his gold, at once the joy, and agony of his life, should have sprung to her memory there and then; but so it was, and the very attempt to syllable that name seemed to freeze up the animation in her face. She grew much paler after that, and her white fingers clung to the silver knob like ice as she opened the great hall-door and looked into the street.

The entrance to the mansion was sheltered, and though the rain was falling, it had not yet penetrated to the threshold. Up and down the broad street no object resembling the strawberry girl could be seen; and with an air of disappointment, the lady was about to close the door, when she saw upon the threshold a broken rose-bud, which had evidently fallen from the child's basket, and beside it the prints of a little, naked foot left in damp tracery on the granite. These foot-prints descended the steps, and with a sigh the lady drew back, closing the door after her gently as she had opened it.