By midnight the dining-room was still, the table cleared, the only sign of what had been was the floor with its scattered leaves.
All tired out with the long hours of gayety, Dorothy had hurried off to bed. There was a little crushed four-leaved clover fastened upon her nightgown as she lay down to her sweet, mysterious, girlish dreams.
CHAPTER IX.
Dorothy’s father, Napoleon Carr, was a man well known and greatly respected throughout the south country where he had always lived. His existence had been a laborious one, for he had entered the lists heavily handicapped in the matter of education. Intellectual enjoyment, dimly realized, had never been his; but he struggled that his family might have a fairer chance. Much of his comfortable income of late years had been generously devoted to the education of his daughter.
He had been happily wedded, though long childless. At length, when Dorothy was born it was at the price of her mother’s life. This was a terrific blow to the husband and father. He was inconsolable with grief. The child was sent to a kinsman for a few months, after which time Mr. Carr felt that he must have her ever with him. To him there was nothing so absorbing as the tender care of Dorothy. He was very prideful of her. He watched her daily growth and then, all at once, while he scarcely realized that the twilight of childhood was passing, the dawn came, and, like the rose vine by his doorway, she burst into bloom.
With what a reverential pride he saw her filling the vacant place, diffusing a fragrance upon all around like the sweet, wet smell of a rose.
He was a splendid horseman and crack shot, and it had been one of his pleasures to teach her to handle horse and gun. Together they would ride and hunt, and no day’s outing was perfect to him unless Dorothy was by his side.
It was not surprising, therefore, to find her a little boyish in her fondness for sport. However, as she grew to womanhood, she sometimes, from a fancy that it was undignified, would decline to take part in these sports. But when he had started off alone with dogs and gun, the sound of running feet behind him would cause him to turn to find Dorothy with penitent face before him. Then lovingly encircling his neck with arms like stripped willow boughs, the repentant words: “I do want to go. I was only in fun,” would be a preface to a long day of delight.
In time these little moods set him thinking, and he began to realize that their beautiful days of sporting comradeship were in a measure over. How he wished she might never outgrow this charm of childhood.
Ah! those baby days, not far past! How often of nights the father went to her bedroom, just touching his child to find out if the covering was right and that she slept well. How many, many times had he leaned over her sleeping form in the dim night light, seeming to see a halo around her head as he watched the dimpling smile about her infant mouth, and, recalling the old nurse saying, that when a baby smiles, angels are whispering to it, took comfort in the thought that maybe it was all true, that the mother was soothing her child to deeper slumber, and so, perhaps, was also beside him. All unconsciously she had slept, never hearing the prayer to God that when the day should come when she would leave him for the man of her heart, death might claim his lone companionship.