When the doctor was gone, Evelina sat down on the chair by the stove and cried bitterly, for a miserable feeling of guilt was over her. The smile on Violet's face was more difficult for her to look at now than the wakeful restlessness of pain and weariness; indeed everything in the room seemed to reproach her this morning: the carriage standing in the corner; the little brown hat with its wreath of buttercups, which something in Evelina's heart told her would never be asked for again; the cake, which had not been tasted; the window-sill littered with the fallen animals which had been shaken from their usual resting-place by the firing of the cannon; and a kind of dull consciousness resting over all that the end was close at hand, and that the child lying so quietly on the bed yonder was, oh so near heaven;—and she—where was she? and what did she know of that peace which the doctor said passed all understanding?
She stood up presently, and going over to the bed, opened the dead mother's Bible. Between the leaves lay the picture which Violet loved so much to look at. Evelina's eye fell on the centre plate, where the little girl was represented seated all alone in the garret-room, looking out over the roofs and the chimneys towards the far-off sky.
"All alone," she murmured, reading the print beneath it; then turned on hastily, for it seemed to remind her painfully of her conduct yesterday. Presently she came on the lock of golden hair which Violet prized so highly, the long, glistening curl tied up with a knot of black ribbon, and she lifted it up carefully and looked at it with interest; then walking softly across to a little mirror which hung against the wall, she laid it against her own golden curls, and said under her breath, "Just the same colour." She put back the hair into the Bible; and then some other thought following quickly on the comparison, she went over to the trunk which stood beside Violet's bed, and, lifting the lid noiselessly, drew out once more from the corner the hat trimmed with the blue forget-me-nots, which she carried into her own room and presently closed the door.
Meanwhile Violet, quite unconscious that her most precious possessions were being ruthlessly trifled with in the adjoining chamber, slept on quietly. She did not rouse up until quite late in the afternoon, when she saw Evelina sitting in the window-seat as usual, and knitting stockings for the Gützberg children.
"I am going soon to see father," she said softly; but at the words, Evelina, who was in a reverie, started violently, and almost let the knitting slip from her fingers.
"Aunt Lizzie will be glad when father comes home; will she not, Evelina?"
"Yes, of course; every one will be glad."
"And the children, the little cousins at Gützberg,—will not they too be delighted?"
"Oh, they are too young to know such things."