“Oh!” she cried; “it was wrong to keep this from me; I should have been brought up under the influence of that face.” But as she further contemplated it, her first enthusiasm faded and an indescribable look of vague distrust stole into her rosy countenance, and robbed it of half its joyousness. “I—I wish there was a picture of my mother here,” she whispered to Clarke, whose arm she had nervously seized. “She had a beautiful face, they say, all gentleness and goodness.”
“Perhaps we shall find one upstairs,” he suggested, turning to open more windows.
“Oh, it is cold,” she murmured, and moved with quite an unaccustomed air of gravity toward the staircase. Her mother’s room, with its many suggestions of days which were not entirely forgotten by her, seemed to restore her mental balance, shaken by that short contemplation of her father’s portrait. She wept as her eyes fell upon the bed where she had last seen the outstretched form of her dying mother; but her tears were tender and quite unlike, both in their source and effect, the shuddering recoil which had seized her after she had gazed a few minutes at her father’s pictured face.
The book which a certain hand had hesitated to touch not so very long ago, she took up, and opening with some difficulty the pages which time and dampness had glued together, she showed Clarke these words, written on one of the blank leaves in front:
“Ah! what is life!
’Tis but a passing touch upon the world;
A print upon the beaches of the earth
Next flowing wave will wash away; a mark
That something passed; a shadow on a wall,
While looking for the substance, shade departs: