CHAPTER XX.
FOUND AND LOST.
"There are words of deeper sorrow
Than the wail above the dead."
"An eagle with a broken wing,
A harp with many a broken string."
t was a pleasant morning in early spring. The sunshine lay in broad sheets of golden light over the fields, and tinted the tree-tops with a yellow luster. The fresh morning air came laden with the fragrance of sweet spring flowers, and the musical chirping of many birds from the neighboring forest was borne to Georgia's ears, as she stood on the veranda, her thoughts far away.
You would scarcely have recognized the flashing-eyed, blooming, wild-hearted Georgia Darrell in this cold, stately, stone-like Miss Randall, with cheek and brow cold and colorless as Parian marble, and the dark, mournful eyes void of light and sparkle.
It could scarcely be expected but that she would sink under the dreary monotony of her life here, so completely different in every way from what she had been accustomed to; and of late, she had fallen into a lifeless lethargy, from which nothing seemed able to arouse her. There were times, it was true, when, for an instant, she would awake, and her very soul would cry out under the galling chains of her intolerable bondage; but these flashes of her old spirit were few and far between, and were always followed by a lassitude, a languor, a dull, spiritless gloom, under which life, and flesh, and health seemed alike deserting her. Her "Hagar in the Wilderness" was finished, and she commenced drawing another, but lacked the energy to finish it.
It was an unnatural life for Georgia—the once wild, fiery, spirited Georgia, and it was probably a year or two, of such existence, would have found her in a lunatic asylum or in her grave, had not an unlooked-for discovery given a new spring to her dormant energies.