“You do wrong to talk so, Lenora,” said Carrie; “but tell me, did you never have any one to love except Willie?”

“Yes,” said Lenora; “when I was a child, a little, innocent child, I had a grandmother—­my father’s mother—­who taught me to pray, and told me of God.”

“Where is she now?” asked Carrie.

“In heaven,” was the answer.  “I know she is there, because when she died there was the same look on her face that there was on your mother’s—­the same that there will be on yours, when you are dead.”

“Never mind,” gasped Carrie, who did not care to be so frequently reminded of her mortality, while Lenora continued: 

“Perhaps you don’t know that my father was, as mother says, a bad man; though I always loved him dearly, and cried when he went away.  We lived with grandmother, and sometimes now, in my dreams, I am a child again, kneeling by grandma’s side, in our dear old eastern home, where the sunshine fell so warmly, where the summer birds sang in the old maple trees, and where the long shadows, which I called spirits, came and went over the bright green meadows.  But there was a sadder day; a narrow coffin, a black hearse, and a tolling bell, which always wakes me from my sleep, and I find the dream all gone, and nothing left of the little child but the wicked Lenora Carter.”

Here the dark girl buried her face in her hands and wept, while Carrie gently smoothed her tangled curls.  After a while, as if ashamed of her emotion, Lenora dried her tears, and Carrie said, “Tell me more of your early life.  I like you when you act as you do now.”

“There is nothing more to tell but wickedness,” answered Lenora.  “Grandma died, and I had no one to teach me what was right.  About a year after her death mother wanted to get a divorce from father; and one day she told me that a lawyer was coming to inquire about my father’s treatment of her.  ‘Perhaps,’ said she, ’he will ask if you ever saw him strike me, and you must say that you have a great many times.  ‘But never did,’ said I; and then she insisted upon my telling that falsehood, and I refused, until she whipped me, and made me promise to say whatever she wished me to.  In this way I was trained to be what I am.  Nobody loves me; nobody ever can love me; and sometimes when Mag speaks so kindly to you, and looks so affectionately upon you, I think, what would I not give for some one to love me; and then I go away to cry, and wish I had never been born.”

Here Mrs. Hamilton called to her daughter, and gathering up her work, Lenora left the room just as Margaret entered it, on her return from the village.

CHAPTER X.

DARKNESS.

As the spring opened and the days grew warmer Carrie’s health seemed much improved; and, though she did not leave her room, she was able to sit up nearly all day, busying herself with some light work.  Ever hopeful, Margaret hugged to her bosom the delusion which whispered, “She will not die,” while even the physician was deceived, and spoke encouragingly of her recovery.