The birds began to warble their mating songs in the broad-leaved magnolia trees outside, as if there were no care nor sorrow, nor blighting disgrace anywhere in the wide, beautiful world.
"My little one," he said to the grave, hollow-eyed child, who seemed suddenly to have grown a full-statured woman, "go to your room and rest. You look terribly ill and wretched. Do not go back to the haunted chamber again, but to your old room down stairs. Try to sleep, if you can."
He looked after her in wonder as she turned to obey him. Yesterday she had been a beautiful, charming, careless child, full of pretty, evanescent angers and quick repentances.
The bloom, the smiles, the brightness were all gone now. The gold-brown lashes drooped heavily against the death-white cheeks, the sweet lips quivered heart-brokenly, the slow and lagging step was that of a weary woman.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
As soon as she had reached the seclusion of her own chamber, little Golden threw herself across her bed and wept as though her tender heart would break.
Strangely nurtured as she had been, the pride of race had been as strong in her young heart as that of any Glenalvan of them all, and the shock of her grandfather's revelation had been a terrible one.
"I wish that I had died in my innocent babyhood," she wept; and her black mammy, who had been lingering near her unobserved, came forward to her and said quickly, while she smoothed the golden hair lovingly with her old black hands: