On Angels' Wings

by Mrs. Greene

"My love is dead, and I am left alone."

Violet listened so earnestly to the words, she was so anxious not to lose one of them, that for a time she forgot her own sorrows, and only thought of the poor woman who was never to see her husband any more, and whose heart seemed so terribly sad in that house only a few doors off.

But presently the mouse plumped down out of the cage overhead almost upon her very knees, and startled her so that she screamed aloud; indeed she screamed several times, and clutched once more at the window-blind to try and drag it aside. And then she paused, for she fancied she had heard a step in the street beneath; and by-and-by she was sure there was a footstep slowly and stealthily creeping up the stairs towards the door of her room.

But no one knocked or asked permission to enter; only there was a slight rustling against the wood, as if some one were waiting and listening outside.

Violet, whose heart had leaped up with joy at the first sound of a human step, now felt terrified. A sudden sickness came over her; the wind from the hill blew in chilly through the window, and seemed to pass over her forehead in waves of ice. Her hands grew damp and cold; and the voice outside, singing in its pain "so quite alone," appeared to her to come from miles away and in a kind of curious dream. She fancied that it was the little girl in the book with the spotted cover who was sitting in a window somewhere "so quite alone," and crying out to the Lord Jesus across the roofs and the distant steeple.

But in a moment, and before she had time to reason out this thought or to wonder whether she was awake or dreaming, there was a crash—a loud crackling as if all the houses in Edelsheim were falling to pieces; and as Violet, completely startled out of her faintness, sat up and looked out of the window, it appeared to her that the gray clouds over the hill had suddenly split open, and that hundreds of fairy snakes were rushing up with a swift fury through the sky. This was immediately succeeded by the same loud sound of voices which she had heard so often through the evening; and then in a moment the fairy snakes were gone, and the sky was full of pale red and green stars falling softly in a shower of beauty to the earth.

"Evelina!" she cried once more, in a piteous entreaty, full of the agony of fear, "Evelina! where art thou?"

There was a knock at the door now; and Violet, forgetful, in her new terror, of the step she had heard a moment ago on the stairs, cried out eagerly, "Come in."

The door opened. Her eyes were still full of the red and green stars which she had seen falling outside over the dark outline of the hill, so for a moment she was dazzled, and could not see who had entered; but all at once, as the figure drew quite close to her chair, she called out loudly and lovingly, "My friend! my friend!" and threw her arms round the neck of the old policeman.

"Ah, thou art frightened, little maiden," he said softly; "and quite alone," he added, looking keenly around the room as he knelt down beside her chair and took the two icy hands in his. The action and the tenderness of the touch brought back for a moment the thought of her father.