She dreamed and wept unconsciously, and told of many things at Teackle Hall, being, indeed, a little child again, playing with her little mistress, Vesta. The stars stood in the sky right over her pillow, and she talked to them, and some she seemed to know, as little Vince, or little Roxy, or Master Willy Tilghman, all playmates of her childhood; but ever and anon these vanished, and the young Quaker woman was reading again from the sermons of Elias Hicks, and the words were: "Love is quietness;" "Light only can qualify the soul;" "If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you."
"What Comforter?" sighed Virgie, and there seemed a great blank, and then she heard a scream—was it she that screamed so?—and she was trying with all her might to get somewhere, and was fainting in the labor, but trying again and again, and then a calmness that was like gentle awe, strange because so painless, spread into her nature, and she only listened.
"My daughter," said a voice, "my own child! Call me 'father,' and say I am forgiven."
"Father! forgiven!" she murmured, and felt a warm face, that yet could not warm her own, shedding tears and kissing her, and close to it her arms were thrown tight, as if she never could let go, and everything was music, but wonderful.
She feared she must fall if she did not hold to him. Who was it that called her "daughter"? Why came those cold stars so close, as if to spy upon him?
Oh, holy purity, that held so fast and did not know, but trusted nature's quivering embrace! She wrestled with something, like a rock of ice, to move her eyes and see, or ere she was dashed down forever, the eyes that gushed for her. They were her master's.
"Master," she said, "whose am I?"
"Mine before God. Pure to my heart as your white sister, Vesta! White as young love, in fondness and trust forever!"
"And mother?" gurgled the girl's low notes; "where is she?"
"Yonder," said the Judge, "in Heaven, that will judge me, whither she winged in bearing thee to me!"