Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton--such was the pretty maiden
name of Nurse Toothaker--possessed beauty that would have gladdened
this dim and dismal chamber as with sunshine. It won for her the
heart of Edward Fane, who has since made so great a figure in the
world, and is now a grand old gentleman, with powdered hair, and as
gouty as a lord. These early lovers thought to have walked hand in
hand through life. They had wept together for Edward's little sister
Mary, whom Rose tended in her sickness, partly because she was the
sweetest child that ever lived or died, but more for love of him. She
was but three years old. Being such an infant, Death could not embody
his terrors in her little corpse; nor did Rose fear to touch the dead
child's brow, though chill, as she curled the silken hair around it,
nor to take her tiny hand, and clasp a flower within its fingers.
Afterward, when she looked through the pane of glass in the coffin-
lid, and beheld Mary's face, it seemed not so much like death, or
life, as like a waxwork, wrought into the perfect image of a child
asleep, and dreaming of its mother's smile. Rose thought her too fair
a thing to be hidden in the grave, and wondered that an angel did not
snatch up little Mary's coffin, and bear the slumbering babe to
heaven, and bid her wake immortal. But when the sods were laid on
little Mary, the heart of Rose was troubled. She shuddered at the
fantasy, that, in grasping the child's cold fingers, her virgin hand
had exchanged a first greeting with mortality, and could never lose
the earthly taint. How many a greeting since! But as yet, she was a
fair young girl, with the dewdrops of fresh feeling in her bosom; and
instead of Rose, which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened
beauty, her lover called her Rosebud.

The rosebud was destined never to bloom for Edward Fane. His mother
was a rich and haughty dame, with all the aristocratic prejudices of