Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/150

140 wake from his dreaming. Yet she was full of her quaint conceit that he could not do without her.

Every morning she arose, she counted another day off her years—"I will be a woman soon." She plied herself to her tasks, and worked until she grew pale and tired. She won prizes at school, and praise.

One night as she sat with her father in the garden, he spoke as he had never done before in her presence. Perhaps it was the great sad beauty of Nature in the night that beat upon his heart, till it broke with a cry.

"Where are you?" he cried, in a voice of agony. "Come to me."

The child was gathering roses in the dusk, some way from him. She was startled by his passion, and kept still.

"I cannot live without you," he continued. "O God, the loneliness! the loneliness!"

The child rose and, threw herself into his outstretched arms. "I am here," she sobbed. "I will not leave you again."

The man pulled himself together. "It is you, poor child! poor child!"

She never forgot that night in the following