"To-morrow night I shall not be here, Juanita," Daisy remarked as she was taking her supper.

"No, Miss Daisy."

"You will be very quiet when I am gone."

It had not been a bustling house, all those weeks! But the black woman only answered,

"My love will come to see Juanita sometimes?"

"O yes. I shall come very often, Juanita—if I can. You know when I am out with my pony, I can come very often,—I hope."

Juanita quite well understood what was meant by the little pauses and qualifying clauses of this statement. She passed them over.

But Daisy shed a good many tears during Juanita's prayer that night. I do not know if the black woman shed any; but I know that some time afterwards and until late in the night, she knelt again by Daisy's bedside, while a whisper of prayer, too soft to arouse the child's slumbers, just chimed with the flutter and rustle of the leaves outside of the window moving in the night breeze.

[Illustration: THE DOCTOR'S TRILOBITE.]

End of Project Gutenberg's Melbourne House, Volume 1, by Susan Warner