The body was being carried past on a hastily improvised litter, and in another moment, as it crossed the threshold of the home she had left two hours before in the heyday of life and health, a woman’s wail of heart-breaking anguish rent the air.
“It’s her mother, her poor mother!” sobbed Mrs. McAlpine. “Wae’s me for the puir heart-broken thing! but, oh! thank God my lassie has come safe home to me!”
Marian burst into wild weeping, and Lulu, unable to bear any more, ran swiftly from the room to that of her father, where, falling on her knees by the bedside, she buried her face in the clothes and cried as if her heart would break.
She seemed to see Edith standing before her, bright and beautiful, full of life and health, as she had seen her—oh, such a little while ago!—then in the cruel embrace of the ferocious wild beast, crushed, bitten, torn, bleeding, and dying—dead. Then the poor body, at last rescued from the clutches of the bear, but with no life left in it, carried along the high road on its rude litter, borne into the house over the way—the happy home of the morning now darkened and made desolate by that sudden, fearful stroke of doom—the mother, bereaved in a manner so fearful, of her only child, bending over it in an agony of woe unutterable.
“And I might have been the one the bear attacked, if I had gone with them, papa mourning over his dead daughter, his heart breaking with the thought that she’d been killed in the very act of disobeying him,” thought Lulu. “I can never, never be thankful enough that I didn’t do it; that God helped me resist the temptation.”
A hand rested lightly, tenderly on her head, and she started up to find her father standing by her side.
She threw herself into his arms, and as he folded her close to his heart, hid her face on his breast, sobbing convulsively. “Oh, papa, it is so, so dreadful! so terrible!”
“Yes,” he said, in tones tremulous with emotion, “my heart aches for the bereaved parents. Oh, thank the Lord that I have my darling safe in my arms!” caressing her with exceeding tenderness, as he sat down, still holding her fast as a treasure he would suffer no earthly power to snatch from his grasp. “You were not with them?”
“No, papa; you bade me stay within doors—at least, you said you wanted me to—and how could I disobey such a dear, kind father? Oh, I couldn’t, though I wanted to go very badly! And if I had—oh, I might have been the one to be killed in that dreadful way!”
“And your father the heart-broken parent weeping over his lost treasure. My dear child, I think you will never regret resisting the temptation to disobey the father who loves you as his life.”