“Blessed is He who gives. Blessed is He who takes away.”
Long, long the poor girl wept, and would not be comforted. What to her was the costly mansion, furnished as few other houses in the city were adorned? What to her a bank account second to few in Boston? What to her, horses, carriages, old family plate, jewels that had been owned generation after generation by her ancestors, now all her own? Her father, ever kind, her mother, with whom she had parted in anger when she chose a heart’s idol, all too early cast down, were gone—forever gone from earth.
It was well her sorrow found relief in tears. She wept until exhausted, and then herself needing a physician, she sank to sleep. She had not till then slept one moment since the night before she started from New York.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
HOW THE NEWS WAS RECEIVED.
Mr. W—— was up and out bright and early that Sunday morning, anxious to see the Sunday papers, daily and weekly, most of which he knew did not go to press till late in the night, or rather early in the morning, and he hoped from these to hear something about the storm on the Sound—something to assure him of the safety of the one who was first and foremost in his thoughts. All that he could find in these papers was that just as they were closing up their columns to go to press a fearful gale was blowing from the northeast, and that disasters on the Sound and all along the Atlantic coast might be expected. But none had been heard from yet. All the Sound line steamers left at their regular hour, and must meet and face the gale en route.
And this was all he could learn without telegraphic news came of sufficient importance to cause the issue of extras. Nervously he watched for these, and at last, not far from noon—a little after it—he heard a street Arab shouting:
“’Ere’s yer extra. ’Ere’s news o’ the big storm!”
He rushed out into the street, tore a paper out of the hand of the yelling urchin, threw him a quarter, and then read the heading in startling capitals:
TERRIBLE STORM!