Herb of Grace

by Rosa Nouchette Carey

"She had seen him, and he looked quite bright and happy, and he was talking to a fair haired-girl with a sweet face, and Mr. Herrick was with them;" but poor Leah could say no more, for the jealous pain seemed to choke her. That was the way he had smiled at her, and now she was forgotten, and this other girl had taken her place!

Mrs. Richardson, with all her eccentricities, had a warm, true heart, and she was very patient and tender with the poor girl.

But late that night, as she sat in her dressing-room, there was a timid knock at her door, and Leah entered in her white wrapper, with all her glorious dark hair streaming over her shoulders; but her eyes were swollen with weeping.

"I felt I must come and speak to you or I could not sleep!" she exclaimed in her deep voice; and kneeling down by her friend—"Oh, I have been so wicked! but I will try to be good now."

"Tell me all about it, dearie," returned Mrs. Richardson in her kind, comforting voice; and she drew the dark head to her shoulder, and a sort of wonder filled her eyes as she saw the glossy lengths of hair that swept the floor.

To an onlooker Mrs. Richardson might have seemed a somewhat grotesque figure in her quilted magenta silk dressing-gown, with her gray fringe pinned up by her maid in little twists and rolls, but her honest eyes beamed with kindness and sympathy.

"Oh, I have been so wicked!" repeated Leah. "All these months I have been praying that he might not suffer as I have been suffering, and that in time he might forget me and be happy; and yet, because my prayer has been answered, and that girl is helping him to forget, I felt as though I hated her;" and then she hid her face in the folds of the gaudy dressing-gown and shed tears of bitter shame and self-loathing.

"My dear, if you cry so you will make yourself ill," observed Mrs. Richardson soothingly. "You have been sorely tried, you poor child, but you are not wicked; on the contrary, I think few girls have behaved so well. Do not call yourself names, dearie; Mrs. Godfrey and I both think you good, and we mean to do our best to make you happy."

"Yes, and I am so grateful to you both, you dear, dear friends," and Leah raised her tear-stained face and kissed her with all the warmth of her loving nature. What was it to her that Mrs. Richardson was an odd-looking, eccentric old lady, whose curled gray fringe and gay attire scarcely harmonised with her homely, weather-beaten features; to Leah her face was transfigured by the loveliness of a kind and tender nature. "I think I saw her as the angels did," she said long years afterwards to one who had served for her as Jacob did for his beloved Rachel; "for I loved every line of her dear homely face. Oh, how she mothered me, who had never known mother love, and how good and patient she was with me in my bad times! If God had not taken her, I could never have left her—never!" For when Mrs. Richardson died some years later, her hand was locked in that of her adopted daughter.

Leah drooped for some time after this encounter. Then, as the summer went on, she recovered her spirits gradually; new duties and interests demanded her attention, and in the wholesome and active life led by the mistress of Sandy Hollow she found plenty to distract her sad thoughts.