“I feel strange to-day, Dawn. It came over me when I left the carriage,—a something I fain would put away, but cannot. Some other time we will talk upon it.”
“May we come in?”
The door was flung wide open, and Florence and her husband stood before them. The children were in the garden just at that moment. The tea-bell rang, and soon they all formed a happy group around the bounteous board.
Revelations come to us sometimes in flashes, at others in partial glimpses. The revelation of Hugh Wyman's feelings towards one he had known but as a friend, came slowly. There was no sudden lifting of the veil, which concealed the image from his sight. It rose and fell, as though lifted by the wind,—and that merely a chance breeze,—no seeming hand of fate controling it.
How should ho know himself; how fathom the strange fluttering of his heart, the quickening breath, the flashing blood, at times when he most earnestly sought to put such emotions away. What meant his child's close words touching his dim thoughts floating like nebulae in his mind? What was this vague questioning state, with no revelations, no answers? He tried to put it away, but each endeavor brought it closer, and he yielded at last to the strange spell.
Three days after their arrival, Miss Evans came from the house of mourning to their home of joy.
Hugh met her suddenly in the garden, whither she had gone in search of Dawn. But where was “Hugh,” her brother, when they met? Not before her. The person had the manners of a stranger, instead of a long absent friend returned.
She sought Dawn, and met with a cordial welcome from her, which in some measure removed the chill from her heart.
Dawn struggled long that night with her feelings. Her thoughts would wander over the sea to one who had so deeply touched her sympathies. Her last meeting with him was in Paris. He then stood with his sister gazing on Schoffer's picture, which so beautifully represents the gradual rise of the soul through the sorrows of earth to heaven. This beautiful work of art “consists of figures grouped together, those nearest the earth bowed down and overwhelmed with the most crushing sorrow; above them are those who are beginning to look upward, and the sorrow in their faces is subsiding into anxious inquiry; still above them are those who, having caught a gleam of the sources of consolation, express in their faces a solemn calmness; and still higher, rising in the air, figures with clasped hands, and absorbed, upward gaze, to whose eye the mystery has been unveiled, the enigma solved, and sorrow glorified.”
That picture floated through her mind.