"God bless you, my Nan. Sleep well, dear, and let us both pray for strength to bear God's will."
The next morning after breakfast Nan discovered why Miss Blake had bade her especially to pray for strength.
Poor child! She felt so utterly weak and helpless in her misery. At first she could scarcely realize what had befallen her and she kept insisting, "It isn't my father that has died. It is some one else. How can I feel that he isn't alive? He can't be dead! He isn't! He isn't! Why, only yesterday I was expecting he would soon be home. It's some other man who hasn't got a daughter that loves him so."
But by and by she grew desperate in her wretchedness and then it took all Miss Blake's influence to restrain her from really wearing herself out in the abandon of her grief.
But by evening the house was quiet. Nan's loud sobbing had ceased and she lay quite still and exhausted, stretched upon the divan in Miss Blake's room, with her throbbing head in the governess' lap. A tender hand stroked her disheveled hair, a tender voice spoke words of comfort to her, and she was soothed and solaced by both.
"Shall I tell you a story, Nan?" asked Miss Blake at length.
The girl gave a silent nod of assent.
"Well, once upon a time," began the governess in a gentle monotone, "there lived two girls and they were friends. They loved each other dearly. One was tall and fair and beautiful, and the other was small and dark, and if people ever thought her even pretty it was because love lighted their kind eyes and made it seem that what they looked upon was sweet.
"The first girl had father and mother and a happy home. The second was an orphan, having nothing to remind her of the parents she had lost when she was a baby but the fortune they had left her. She never knew what love meant until she met her beautiful friend. Then she learned. Oh, how those two girls loved each other! When Florence, the beautiful one, found that Isabel had no home she pleaded with her parents to take her into theirs, and they not only took her to their home but to their hearts as well. And so she and her dear friend grew up together like sisters, and the little lonely girl was not lonely any more, but very, very happy among those she loved. Well, time went on, and by and by when the two girls had become quite young women, the first more beautiful than ever, the other a little less plain, maybe, something happened that, in the end, caused them to be separated forever.
"God sent into their lives the self-same experience and into their hearts the self-same thought. It was a beautiful experience and a beautiful thought, but if it was to mean happiness for one, it must be at the cost of grief to the other. Perhaps it was because they both knew this that neither of them told her secret. But presently it was decided which was to have the happiness. It came to the one who expected it least—who had the least right to expect it. It came to Isabel, and for a moment she thought she might accept it. But it was only for a moment. Then she knew that she must relinquish it. It would have been base, would it not, my Nan, to have defrauded the friend who had done so much for her? And so she, Isabel, left the house that had been her home for so many years, and quite solitary and alone sailed across the sea to the other side of the world, and there she stayed for—well, over a dozen years, my dear.