die, and not be left alone.

"It will be so lonely--so cold without my mother!" she murmured.
"Oh, let me go with her; I _cannot_ live alone."

"Dora, my darling," came faintly from the rude couch, and in an
instant the child was at her mother's side.

Winding her arms fondly about the neck of her daughter, and
pushing the soft auburn hair from off her fair, open brow, Mrs.
Deane gazed long and earnestly upon her face.

"Yes, you are like me," she said at last, "and I am glad that it
is so, for it may be Sarah will love you better when she sees in
you a look like one who once called her sister. And should
_he_ ever return----"

She paused, while her mind went back to the years long ago--to the
old yellow farmhouse among the New England hills--to the gray-
haired man, who had adopted her as his own when she was written
_fatherless_--to the dark-eyed girl, sometimes kind, and
sometimes overbearing, whom she had called her sister, though
there was no tie of blood between them. Then she thought of the
red house just across the way, and of the three brothers,
Nathaniel, Richard, and John. Very softly she repeated the name of
the latter, seeming to see him again as he was on the day when,
with the wreath of white apple blossoms upon her brow, she sat on
the mossy bank and listened to his low spoken words of love. Again
she was out in the pale starlight, and heard the autumn wind go
moaning through the locust trees as _Nathaniel_, the strange,