With a cry of delight, she held out her arms.
"Dear Mr. Lindsay, I shall thank you, and pray for you, and love you as long as I live!"
He put a small packet in her hand, and whispered:
"Here is something I wish you to keep until you are eighteen. Do not open it before that time, unless I give you permission, or unless you know that I am dead."
He drew her tenderly to his heart, and his lips pressed her cheek.
Then he said brokenly:
"O God! be merciful in all things, to my darling!"
A moment after she heard his rapid footsteps on the gravelled walk, followed by the clang of the gate; then a great loneliness as of death fell upon her.
There are indeed sorrows "that bruise the heart like hammers," and age it suddenly, prematurely. In subsequent years Regina looked back to the incidents of this eventful Sabbath, and marked it with a black stone in the calendar of memory as the day on which she "put away childish things," and began to see life and the world through new, strange disenchanting lenses, that dispelled all the gilding glamour of childhood, and unexpectedly let in a grey dull light that chilled and awed her.
With tearless but indescribably mournful eyes, she looked vacantly at the door through which her friend had vanished, as it then seemed, for ever, and, finding that her own remarks were entirely unheard, unheeded, Hannah touched her shoulder.
"Poor thing! Are you ready to let me carry you upstairs?"