THE ORPHAN'S DEPARTURE.
BY MARGARET FLOYD.
(See Plate.)
THE early years of few have been so carefully guarded and protected as were those of Edith Frazier. Her father was the rector of a church in a beautiful but secluded country village in the south of England. In addition to his sincere piety and high-toned moral character, Mr. Frazier possessed a well-cultivated mind. His wife was also a superior woman, and as Edith was their only child, her early training was the object of their most careful attention. In a lovely and sequestered home, surrounded not only by the comforts and luxuries, but the elegances of life, and in close association with persons of high refinement and elevated goodness, the young girl grew slowly up to womanhood. There was no undue excitement of vanity or the passions to force her, like some hothouse plant, into an early maturity; and no unseasonable call upon her for self-reliance or exertion, which entirely blots out of some lives the sweet carelessness of girlhood. At sixteen, she was still almost a child, when the death of her mother, her first great sorrow, made her sensible for the first time that this world is not the place for that uninterrupted happiness which had, until then, been her portion.
Edith was almost heart-broken at the loss of her mother. They had been constant companions, and she missed her every moment more and more. Mr. Frazier tried to supply to his daughter the place both of father and mother, but he was a studious, reserved man, and himself suffering deeply from his bereavement, so that they did little else but remind each other constantly of their great sorrow.
About a year after Mrs. Frazier's death, finding that his daughter did not rally from the depression so foreign to her nature, Mr. Frazier proposed a tour through the northern part of England and Scotland. It was just at the beginning of the pleasant summer weather, and, arranging matters in his parish so that his absence for two or three months would not be felt, he decided to leave immediately.
On the Sunday before his departure, a stranger was seen in the little parish church. He was a man who would have been noticed in any place, and who, in a quiet country village, was an object of general attention. Tall, handsome, and with a strikingly high-bred and gentlemanlike appearance, he would have been singled out anywhere as one of nature's nobility. Edith was struck and gratified by the stranger's evident interest in the sermon her father preached that day. It was one with which he had taken especial pains, and the daughter, proud as well as fond of her father, was glad to see that he had at least one appreciative listener.
A few days after, Mr. Frazier and Edith set out on their journey. London was their first stopping-place, and several very busy days were spent there, while Edith, with the vivid interest of one to whom almost everything in that vast and crowded city was strange and new, visited the many places of interest and note within it. While they were standing in St. Paul's, the stranger who had attracted their attention in Hillcomb, their own village, a few days before, passed them with a look of evident recognition. They met again while going over Westminster Abbey; and it so happened that they were at the same time paying to the genius of Shakspeare the homage of a visit to his grave at Stratford, and that they passed each other again while strolling over the grounds around Newstead Abbey.
By this time they had advanced so far on the way to acquaintanceship, that, when they again encountered each other near the lakes in Westmoreland, the home of so many of the poets of England, a bow was the almost involuntary mark of recognition. English reserve and shyness might have prevented any more intimate intercourse, but for an accident that happened to Edith in Scotland.