The same morning, when Mr. Helmstedt walked through the woods down to the grave, he found his daughter Margaret sitting sewing by the grassy mound. She arose as her father approached, and stood waiting to retire at his bidding.
“No, no, my child! you need not go now. Sit down here by me.” And Philip Helmstedt took his seat and motioned Margaret to place herself by his side.
“Now tell me about your mother, Margaret,” he said.
The poor girl controlled her feelings and obeyed—related how, for months past, her mother’s life had steadily waned, how at shorter and still shorter intervals those dreadful heart spasms had occurred—how—though the narrator did not then know why—she had put her house in order—how anxiously, feverishly she had looked and longed for his return, until that fatal day when a sudden attack of the heart had terminated her existence.
“But her last hours! her last hours, Margaret?”
“They were tranquil, my father. I spent the last night alone with her—she talked to me of you. She bade me give you these farewell kisses from her. She bade me tell you that her last love and thoughts were all yours—and to beg you, with my arms around your neck and my head on your bosom, to comfort yourself by loving her little, bereaved daughter,” said the child, scarcely able to refrain from sobbing.
“And I will, my Margaret! I will be faithful to the charge,” replied the proud man, more nearly humbled than he had ever before been in his life.
“I passed the last two hours of her life alone with her. She died with her head on my bosom, her hand over my shoulder. Her last sigh—I seem to feel it now—was breathed on my forehead and through my hair.”
“Oh, Heaven! But yourself, my Margaret. What were her directions in regard to your future?”
“She had received your letter, dear father, intrusting her with the sole disposal of your daughter’s hand. And being so near dissolution, she sent for Mr. Houston and joined our hands in betrothal at her deathbed. Then she wished that after she had departed her orphan girl should go home with Mr. Houston to wait your will and disposition, my father.”