"RICHARD ASHTON."
CHAPTER IX.
RUTH'S MISGIVINGS AND MENTAL AGONY.
It is now time that we should return to Ruth and her children.
After her husband had left her, as we narrated in the first chapter, she was very sad, almost desolate, and she felt she must retire to hold communion with Him who promised to give rest to the weary soul who came to Him; so, leaving little Mamie in care of Eddie and Allie, she retired to her room to weep and also to pray. She was literally following the injunction of her Saviour—praying to her Father in secret that He might reward her openly. The reward she longed for was that He would protect her husband and influence him to walk aright.
As she was thus alone—and yet not alone, for God was with her—her memory took her back to the sunny days of her girlhood. How bright those halcyon days appeared! She was in fancy again walking amid the green fields and by the hedgerows of dear old England, plucking the daisies from the meadows and listening to the sweet strains of the lark as it carolled its lay to the morning. Sunny visions of the past, with loved faces wandering in their golden light, flitted before her; and her heart was filled with sadness as she remembered the breaks that Time, with his relentless hand, had made in that once happy number. She found herself unconsciously repeating—
"Friend after friend departs—
Who hath not lost a friend?
There is no union here of hearts
That hath not here an end."
Then the thoughts of the days when Richard Ashton came wooing, of moonlight walks, of music and literature—these incidents of joyful days flitted before her, each for a moment, and then vanished away, like dissolving views. Some who sought her then were now opulent, filling positions of honor and great responsibility; and some of her associates who then envied her, because she was more sought after than they, were now presiding over palatial homes.
As these visions of the happy days of yore passed like fairy dreams before her she heaved an involuntary sigh as she passionately exclaimed: "Oh drink, thou hast been our curse; turning our happiness into misery; our Eden of bliss into a waste, weary wilderness of poverty and woe!"
"Mamma, mamma, may I tum, I have such a petty flower to show oo."