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 of this glorious morning, in the anticipation of a good breakfast? Ingrate, look at me."

"You would make the most confirmed stoic smile, you are so delightfully gay," said Margaret, with a little sigh.

"My dear, you are now in the gloom of youth; I have passed through it myself. I, even I,—the frivolous, the light-headed,—have felt much of the sort of sorrow which is now vexing you. It is, in a way, an imaginary sorrow. You are learning the realities of life; you are finding out that Death and Grief and Love and Sin are not purely allegorical figures sculptured on the walls which bound your life-path, but real creatures, with which you must grapple and wrestle, which you must conquer or be conquered by, not once, but a thousand times. You are finding this out. You have read of these four personages, you have seen many pictures of them, you have perhaps typified them with your own hands; but you have never realized their existence till now."

Margaret shook her head and straightened a fold of her friend's gown. She had a profound conviction that the feelings to which she was now a prey had never been experienced before, and that her debonair friend was incapable of suffering as she suffered; and yet Sara Harden bore a wound in her heart which not even time had healed,—the grief of a mother