“Where is Fanny?” he asked, and his arms closed fondly around his wife.
It mattered not that time and care had dimmed the lustre of her eye, and robbed her cheek of its girlish bloom; to him she was beautiful still, for through weal and woe she had been faithful to her marriage vow, and now the bitterest pang of all was the leaving her alone.
“The God of the widow and the fatherless watch over and keep you all so that at the last, when I ask for my children, there shall not one be missing,” he said, as his arms unclosed, and then, with a low, wailing moan, the mother bent over the white face of her son, so that the wife might not see the fearful change which had come upon it, for my father was dead!
You who have kept with me while I described the death scene of the unfortunate Herbert, and of my sainted father, can you not—do you not say, “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his?”
Lonely and desolate was the home at which I arrived one day too late, for they had buried him, and there was naught left to me of my father save the lock of hair which they severed from his head as he lay in the coffin. Yes, he was gone; but so long as life and being endure, so long shall fond remembrances of him linger in my memory, and if at the last I meet him in the better world, will it not be in a measure the blessed influence of his dying message, which has led the wanderer there?
CHAPTER XX.
GOING SOUTH.
After the first shock of our sorrow was over, the question arose as to what we were to do in future for our support. Grandma was already old, while mother was not so young as she had been once, and neither could do much towards their own maintenance, which necessarily would devolve upon us their children. It had ever been a pet project of mine to go South as a teacher, and when one day in looking over a Boston paper I accidentally came across the advertisement of a Georgia lady, Mrs. A. D. Lansing, who wished for a private governess, I resolved at once to apply for the situation, greatly fearing lest I might be too late.
I was not, however; for after waiting impatiently for a few weeks, I received a letter from the lady herself, who, after enumerating the duties I was expected to perform and the branches I was to teach, added, in a P. S.: “Before making any definite arrangements with Miss Lee, Mrs. Lansing wishes to be informed if, either by her friends or herself, she is considered pretty, as a person of decidedly ordinary looks will be preferred.”
“Spiteful, jealous old thing!” exclaimed Lizzie, who was looking over my shoulder, “I wouldn’t stir a step.”
But I thought differently. My curiosity was roused to know the cause of her strange freak; and then, too, six hundred dollars per year would amply atone for any little peculiarities in my employer. So I answered her letter forthwith, assuring her that neither my friends nor myself had ever been guilty of calling me pretty—in short, I was decidedly homely, and trusted that on that point at least I should please her.