Page:Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920).djvu/77

Rh imprinted themselves indelibly on Rachel’s remembrance. She understood clearly and hopelessly that she could never have a father — that, in this respect, she must always be unlike other people.

“Your father cares nothing for you,” said Isabella Spencer in conclusion. “He never did care. You must never speak of him to anybody again.”

Rachel slipped silently from her mother’s knee and ran out to the Springtime garden with a full heart. There she cried passionately over her mother’s last words. It seemed to her a terrible thing that her father should not love her, and a cruel thing that she must never talk of him.

Oddly enough, Rachel’s sympathies were all with her father, in as far as she could understand the old quarrel. She did not dream of disobeying her mother and she did not disobey her. Never again did the child speak of her father; but Isabella had not forbidden her to think of him, and thenceforth Rachel thought of him very constantly — so constantly that, in some strange way, he seemed to become an unguessed-of part of her inner life — the unseen, ever-present companion in all her experiences.

She was an imaginative child, and in fancy she made the acquaintance of her father. She had never seen him, but he was more real to her than most of the people she had seen. He played and talked with