One afternoon, just reentering the house from some gay farewell of friends, she found her father sitting in the hall, and she stood tiptoing in the door-way while smiling at him, with a fragrant vine half twisted in her dark drooping hair, the heat making her cheek yet paler, and the great blue-green eyes shining at him from under the black straight brows, like aquamarine jewels.  Mr. Erne leaned forward in the chair, with hands clasped upon his knees, and eyes upbent.

“Eloise!  Eloise!” he cried in a piercing voice, then grew white, and fell back in the cushions.

The girl flew to him, took the head upon her shoulder, caressed the deathly face, warmed the mouth with her own.

“Child!” he murmured, “I thought it was your mother!”

And by midnight, alone, and in the dark, he died, and went to find that mother.

As for Eloise, she was like some one made dumb by a thunderbolt.  Her garden had become a desert.  Ice had fallen in her summer.  Death was too large a fact for her to comprehend.  She had seen the Medusa’s head in its terror, but not in its loveliness, and been stricken to stone.  At length in the heart of that stone the inner fountains broke,—­broke in rains of tempestuous tears, such gusts and gushes of grief as threatened to wash away life itself; and when Eloise issued from this stormy deep, the warmth and the wealth of being obscured, the effervescence and bubble of the child destroyed, feeling like a flower sodden with showers, if she had been capable of finding herself at all, she would have found herself a woman.

Among Mr. Erne’s disorderly papers, full of incipient schemes, sketches, and schedules of gold-mining, steam-companies, and railways to the nebulae in Orion, was discovered after his death a scrap witnessed by two signatures.  The owner of one of these signatures was already dead, and there were no means to prove its genuineness.  The other was that of a young man who had just enough of that remote taint in his descent which incapacitates one, in certain regions, from bearing witness.  It was supposed that Mr. Erne had some day hurriedly executed this paper in the absence of his lawyer, as being, possibly, better than no paper at all, and he had certainly intended to have the whole matter arranged legitimately; but these are among the things which, with a superstitious loitering, some men linger long before doing, lest they prove to be, themselves, a death-warrant.

By this paper, in so many words, Disbrowe Erne left to Eloise Changarnier all the property of which he died possessed.  An old friend of her father’s in the neighborhood assured her that the only relatives were both distant, distinguished, and wealthy, unlikely to present any claims, and that she would be justified in fulfilling her father’s desire.  And so, without other forms, Eloise administered the affairs of The Rim,—­waiting until the autumn to consult the usual lawyer, who was at present in England.