Angels ever bright and fair,
Take, O take, me to your care.
It came to me that they had taken Margot in a chariot of fire, and I seemed to see her in an angel throng with a palm branch in her hand.
My favourite trinket is a heart-shaped locket, containing a lock of dark brown hair, intermixed with golden threads. It is both a souvenir, and a mascot; for the hair is from the head of my girl chum Margot.
V.—IRENE: THE SNOW FLOWER.
I.
Bedfellows.
Amongst Miss Melford's intimate friends, when I was a boarder at her school, was a silvery-haired, stately lady, known as Mrs. Dace, who in her early life had been gouvernante to the Imperial children at the court of the Czar. Her old friends and pupils wrote to her frequently, and she still took a keen interest in the Slav, and in things Slavonic.
When her Russian friends—the Petrovskys—came to England, they left their youngest child, Irene, as a pupil at Miss Melford's school, to pursue her education while they travelled in Western Europe for a while.
Irene Petrovsky was a pretty little thing, with flaxen hair and clear blue eyes, and we called her the Snow Flower, after that beautiful Siberian plant which blooms only in midwinter. I have never forgotten her first appearance at the school. When Miss Melford led her into the classroom we all looked up at the small figure in its plain white cloth frock trimmed with golden sable, and admired the tiny fair curls which clustered round her white brow. She made a grand court curtsey, and then sat silently, like a wee white flower, in a corner.
We elder pupils were made guardians of the younger ones in Miss Melford's school, and it was my duty as Irene's guardian to take her to rest in the little white nest next to mine in the long dormitory. In the middle of the first night I was disturbed by a faint sobbing near me, and I sat up to listen. The sobs proceeded from the bed of the little Russian girl, and I found she was crying for her elder sister, who, she said, used to take her in her arms and hold her by the hand until she fell asleep. A happy thought came to me; my white nest was larger than hers. So I bade her creep into it, which she readily did, and nestled up to me, like a trembling, affrighted little bird, falling at last into a calm, sweet sleep.
From that time forward we two were firm friends, and the girls used to call the Little Russ, Gloria's shadow.