Mrs. Stanhope became more tranquil as these words fell on her ear, but her face still wore an expression of inconsolable grief.  She was silent a few moments, and then she told Mrs. Stein that she meant to take Nora home and lay her beside the little boy in the garden by the Rhine, and that she should send to her true friend and house-keeper Clarissa to come at once to Oak-ridge to make the preparations for their return, and accompany her on her painful journey.  This arrangement was a great relief to Mrs. Stein, who returned home with an easier mind, and hastened to impart this bit of good news to her sister.  But aunty was nowhere to be found, and Emma, who was sitting alone in an unusually subdued mood, told her mother that she was probably with Fred, who had been looking for her, “to show her a beetle or some such thing,” she supposed!  So Mrs. Stein sat down with her little girl, who wanted to ask her questions about Nora.  Emma longed to hear that Nora had not suffered from her neglect, and had been contented and happy without her; for she had been feeling more and more how selfish she had been in never repeating her first visit, merely because she had not herself enjoyed it, never thinking what she might have done for poor sick Nora.

Fred had sought his aunt for a long time, and when he found her he carried her off to a remote part of the garden, where stood a lonely summer-house.  There he drew her down beside him on a bench, and said he had something to say to her alone.

“Do you know, aunty, I saw Nora to-day, and she is dead; and I cannot see how she can come to life again, and go to heaven.”

“You cannot understand that, Fred?  Neither can I. But the good God does many things which we cannot understand, and yet we know they are.  And as we are told by One whom we can trust that we shall live again after our body dies, we must believe it.  I believe it, Fred, with all my heart.”

“But,” argued Fred, “I have always thought that life is the same in men as in animals, and when an animal dies, it can never be made alive again.  I have noticed that myself.”

At this moment, the conversation was interrupted, for they saw the doctor in the garden, and aunty hastened to join him, as she had promised to visit his cauliflowers with him this evening.

Fred sat still lost in thought; he did not care for cauliflowers.

CHAPTER IX.

A last journey and A first.

A large travelling-carriage passed by the door of the doctor’s house, in which sat alone, a lady clothed in black.  It was Clarissa, who had come to carry little Nora to her home by the Rhine.  The doctor’s four children were standing in the garden, and they watched it as it passed, thinking what a sad journey its occupant must have had.  Their aunt stood at an upper window watching it also, and as it disappeared round the corner she beckoned Fred to come up to her in his room.  He came running up the stairs.