The secret of Oaklands

by M. Harding Kelly

The next few days were like a dream to Margaret; she seemed to live in another world. Her father rallied from this first attack, and was sufficiently recovered to spend some hours with his lawyer. Then his mind seemed to grow dull, and he talked feebly and childishly of the old happy days when his wife was alive and his daughter a little child—the sunbeam and plaything of the house.

A few days of weakness followed, then came the night when the spirit took its flight from earth's habitation, quietly and silently, in answer to God's summons, and fled to that sorrowless land where all is joy and peace, and rest. And in the dawn of the morning the watchers saw only the hush of death's release for the master; "God's finger touched him, and he slept."

Margaret did not break down; the sorrow seemed too much to bear, too much to understand at first. She felt numb with grief; her cold apathy disturbed the kind nurse, who stayed until the funeral should be over.

"I wish she would cry," she remarked to the doctor; "this terrible calm is unnatural, and a fearful strain."

"Yes—yes—poor child, the reaction will, I am afraid, be all the greater," he answered sympathetically; "but youth is bound to recover."

But it was not until the day of the funeral that Margaret fully realised her loss, when she knelt by her window alone, the pale moon looking down upon her from the clear cold sky. Then the greatness of her bereavement came over her, and she felt, in all the sadness of realisation, the desolation of her future.

Her dear, dear father was taken from her, the one being she loved in all the world, the one who had been everything to her since she had lost her mother, her darling companion as well as parent. And as though to mock at her grief she had learned that day for the first time from the lawyer's lips that she was penniless. Owing to the great bank failure, her father's money had melted away into thin air; and her home, the dear old Abbey House, must pass into other hands, and be sold at once to meet the demands of her father's creditors.

To-night was hers—to-night she could wander through the rooms, and take a last farewell walk round the gardens and park, and touch as she had touched the friend of her childhood, the fine old cedar which had silently watched many generations of Woodfords seated under its sheltering boughs. With tender, lingering fingers she had pressed the smooth trunk, and then broken a tiny piece of the beautiful evergreen, and put it among her own personal treasures. It was that which lay in her hand now, and upon which the fast-falling tears dropped, as she said good-bye to the happiness of the old home, so soon to pass into the possession of strangers. She covered her face, while silent sobs shook her, in the sorrow of those moments.

Presently she grew calm again, and, gazing through the window of her room at those bright worlds which canopy our earth above, her lips moved, and her voice whispered to the One Who knew all her trouble and understood: "Father in Heaven, help me, Thy child, to do Thy will wherever Thou seest fit to send me."

There was no outward answer to that prayer, but the answer was speeding to her then, and strength to prepare her for the difficult days to come.