Ay, close your doors; shut out the world; draw close your curtains; fold them to your heart,—­your crushed, bleeding, desolate heart!  Lay your forehead to the soft cheek of your noble boy;—­beware, beware how you dampen that damask cheek with your scalding tears:  yet you cannot help it; they fall—­great drops—­a river of tears, as you gather him convulsively to your bosom!

“Father, why do you cry so?” says Frank, with the tears of dreadful sympathy starting from those eyes of childhood.

——­“Why, papa?”—­mimes little Nelly.

——­Answer them, if you dare!  Try it;—­what words—­blundering, weak words—­choked with agony—­leading nowhere—­ending in new and convulsive clasps of your weeping, motherless children!

Had she gone to her grave, there would have been a holy joy, a great and swelling grief indeed,—­but your poor heart would have found a rest in the quiet churchyard; and your feelings, rooted in that cherished grave, would have stretched up toward Heaven their delicate leaves, and caught the dews of His grace, who watcheth the lilies.  But now,—­with your heart cast underfoot, or buffeted on the lips of a lying world,—­finding no shelter and no abiding place!—­alas, we do guess at infinitude only by suffering!

——­Madge, Madge! can this be so?  Are you not still the same sweet, guileless child of Heaven?

VII.

Peace.

It is a dream,—­fearful, to be sure, but only a dream!  Madge is true.  That soul is honest; it could not be otherwise.  God never made it to be false; He never made the sun for darkness.

And before the evening has waned to midnight, sweet day has broken on your gloom;—­Madge is folded to your bosom, sobbing fearfully,—­not for guilt, or any shadow of guilt, but for the agony she reads upon your brow, and in your low sighs.

The mystery is all cleared by a few lightning words from her indignant lips, and her whole figure trembles, as she shrinks within your embrace, with the thought of that great evil that seemed to shadow you.  The villain has sought by every art to beguile her into appearances which should compromise her character and so wound her delicacy as to take away the courage for return; he has even wrought upon her affection for you as his master-weapon:  a skilfully contrived story of some accident that had befallen you, had wrought upon her—­to the sudden and silent leave of home.  But he has failed.  At the first suspicion of his falsity, her dignity and virtue shivered all his malice.  She shudders at the bare thought of that fiendish scheme which has so lately broken on her view.

“Oh, Clarence, Clarence, could you for one moment believe this of me?”

“Dear Madge, forgive me if a dreamy horror did for an instant palsy my better thought;—­it is gone utterly; it will never, never come again!”

And there she leans with her head pillowed on your shoulder, the same sweet angel that has led you in the way of light, and who is still your blessing and your pride.