AGATHA'S LONELY DAYS.
They had buried Agatha's mother,—put her away under a sheltering tree, beloved of bird and breeze, which waved its boughs between her and the bending, changeful summer sky. Agatha thought no other spot in the world could be so pleasant or so dear; and she longed, from the depths of her little, ten-years-old heart, to stay there with bird, and breeze, and tree, and the buried mother, who must hear her voice, she thought, even though she could never reply to it again in all the years.
Her father, pale with sorrow himself, had never come near enough to his child to be her comforter now. He talked little to any one of either his joys or his sorrows. Agatha loved him, partly because she had always been taught to love and have faith in him; and, partly, too, because she knew well, with that childish and intuitive perception which discovers every thing, how dear he was to her mother; but she did not feel near to him, and she could not possibly have told him how she longed to stay there beside that grave. She made no protest when he took her hand to lead her away, though it seemed to her that she left her heart behind her, and that the lump in her breast was a cold stone to which warmth would never come back any more.
She went home, and some one took off her little black hat, and put on an apron over her mourning gown, and then she was left in peace to sit at the window, and look out toward the spot where they had laid her mother, and wonder what was to become of her. They called her to supper, but she was not hungry,—she thought she never should be again,—and there was no mother to beguile her with dainty morsels. When they found she did not want to come they let her alone, and still she sat there and wondered.
At last the twilight fell, and in the dusk her father came to her. He loved her very dearly; and especially now, that her mother was gone, and only she was left to him, he felt for her an unspeakable tenderness; literally unspeakable, for he did not know how to utter one word of it to his child. He longed to comfort her,—to tell her how dear she was to him,—but he could not. He sat down beside her, and looked at her little pale face, outlined against the western window, with such a depth of pity that it seemed to make his voice quieter and colder than ever when he spoke, because it required such an effort to speak at all.
"To-morrow, Agatha, I shall take you to your Aunt Irene. Every girl needs a woman's care, and she will watch over you as faithfully as if you were her own."
Agatha never dreamed of objecting. She tried to think that she might as well be in one place as another, for she shouldn't live long anywhere without her mother. But she dreaded Aunt Irene's watching, as she dreaded few things in the world. She had made visits now and then at the quiet old homestead of which this aunt was mistress, and it seemed to her, on such occasions, that Aunt Irene did nothing but watch her from the time she entered the house; and in those days it had taken all the sunshine of her mother's joyous nature to gild the visits into some substitute for the pleasures other children took in their vacations. Now, to go without her mother—all alone—and be "watched over" by her aunt! She began to know that she had a heart, after all, by its frightened fluttering.
Aunt Irene was her father's sister, with all the Raymond peculiarities of pride, and reserve, and silence, which made him half a stranger to his own child, intensified in her by her life of seclusion and of absolute authority over herself and her possessions. Her experiences had been narrow, and her aims had been narrow also. Mr. Raymond saw this, his one sister, always at her best; and, through long knowledge of her, he understood her really trustworthy and excellent qualities. He felt that he was doing for Agatha the best which fate now permitted him to do, in confiding her to this guidance, so sure to be wise, as he believed, even if not loving.