Page:Cuthbert Bede - The White Wife.djvu/34

Rh made a sudden bend towards the bridge by which the road crossed the stream, there the foot-tracks ceased; that, searching into the water, the unhappy father discovered the body of his daughter floating in the stream, her eyes wide open, and a smile upon her lips. She was so like life, that, at first, he fancied she breathed; but he was too quickly undeceived; she had been dead and cold for some time; and so also was her babe, whom she had clasped tightly in her last embrace. She had nothing on but her nightclothes; and this fact would seem to show that her mind was wandering when she took such a walk on such an inclement night. Ever after this it was said, and universally believed, that her spirit revisited the scene of her sad fate on every anniversary; and, that those who were abroad at that spot, at a certain hour in the early morning of the New Year's Day, would see her white figure, traversing, with her babe, the narrow path on the bank of the stream, until it had arrived at the place where it made the bend towards the bridge, when the white figure would suddenly disappear and would not be seen again until the next New Year's