Cloaked and hooded, the school-girls were all ready for departure after the three long, welcome strokes of the great clock; when Leah said, "It's growing chilly, Lizzie. Wrap your shawl closely around you, for it's cold out on the corridor. Come, let's go out at the rear door before it is locked."
Ascending a spiral staircase, the two girls reached the upper corridor that ran across the south side of the end wing of the building.
"Suppose Madam Truxton should come upon us, Lizzie, what would she think?" said Leah, as the two girls crouched down closer together at the end of the corridor.
"Nothing wrong, I guess, as we have our books; and perhaps we had better look over our French a minute. What do you say?"
"So we had, as it comes first in the morning," and bending their heads together the girls were silent for a time, pretending to study. At length Lizzie closed the book, and Leah began her story. LEAH'S STORY.
"I shudder, Lizzie, when I think of unfolding the sad story of my life to you; and yet, I am impelled to do so by this hunger for sympathy that is so constantly gnawing at my heart. As I have told you before, my heart strangely turns to you in sorrow. In the three years that I have known you, and we have seen each other daily, I have never known you guilty of a single act or word that was unworthy—"
"Oh! Leah—"
"Do not interrupt me, Lizzie. You must hear my story now, though it shall be briefly told; and I have one request to make, my dear. It is, that you have charity for my faults, and pity for me in my many temptations." She continued:
"As you have known before, my mother died when I was a very little child, scarcely three years old. I remember her but very indistinctly. The woman who is now my father's wife, was his housekeeper in my mother's life-time. She, of course, came from the common walks of life, her father being a very poor butcher. How she ever became my father's wife, I do not know; but my old nurse used to intimate to me that it was by no honorable means. Be that as it may, he married her when I was four years of age; and from that date my miserable story begins. The first incident of my life after this second marriage which I remember most vividly was this. A year after my father's marriage to Rebecca, business of importance called him to England, and a long-cherished desire to see his aged parents took him to Bohemia, where they lived, after the business in Liverpool was transacted. How I fared while he was gone, I dimly remember; but well enough, I suppose, as I was still partially under the care and control of my faithful nurse, a colored woman of kind and tender heart.
"Poor, dear old woman, she is dead long ago!