Page:Traits and Trials.pdf/14

8 turns the heart to its home which is in heaven. Even like the glorious sunset which, of all hours in the day, seems the most to mingle the influences of the world above with that below—when the golden light invests all familiar objects with a glory not their own; and yet the long shadows fall, the deepest heralds of the coming night: so do the lights and shadows of human existence mingle together.

Mrs. Dalton's pale cheek flushed, and her eye wore somewhat of its former brightness, as she watched those two graceful and happy creatures bound over the grass, on an infinity of schemes which almost always ended in bringing them to her side. But no one who looked on that face with other than the undiscerning eye of childhood but must have read on that wan, though youthful, brow the slow, but certain, approach of death. Mrs. Dalton had been born in India, and, like those more delicate exotics which pine and perish in a northern clime, she was fading, but as gradually as the flower that languishes for its native earth.