violet, full of the light of youth, and the lips were smiling.

It was, indeed, no wonder that Miss Ludington had mourned the vanishing
from earth of this delectable maiden with exceeding bitterness, or that
her heart yet yearned after her with an aching tenderness across the gulf
of years.

How bright, how vivid, how glowing had been the life of that beautiful
girl! How real as compared with her own faint and faded personality,
which, indeed, had shone these many years only by the light reflected
from that young face! And yet that life, in its strength and brightness,
had vanished like an exhalation, and its elements might no more be
recombined than the hues of yesterday's dawn.

Miss Ludington had hung the portraits of her father and mother with
immortelles, but the frame of the girl's picture she had wound with
deepest crape.

Her father and mother she did not mourn as one without hope, believing
that she should see them some day in another world; but from the death of
change which the girl had died no Messiah had ever promised any
resurrection.




CHAPTER II.