For some moments, Beryl lay motionless, then the intolerable agony clutched her throat with an aching sense of suffocation, and she sat up, with nerveless hands lying on the package in her lap.  She was prepared for, expectant of the worst, but the details added keener stings to suffering that had benumbed her.  At last, with a shuddering sigh, she broke the seal, and took from folds of tissue paper, a long thick tress of the beautiful black hair.  Shaking it out of its satin coil, she held it up, then wrapped it smoothly over her hand, and laid it caressingly against her cheek.

Prison walls melted away; she stood again in the New York attic, and combed, and brushed, and braided those raven locks, and saw the wan face of the beloved invalid, and the jasmine and violets she had pinned at her throat.

What had become of the proud, high-spirited ambitious girl, who laughed at adverse fortune, and forgot poverty in lofty aspirations?  How long ago it seemed, since she kissed the dear faded cheek, and knelt for her mother’s farewell benediction.  Was it the same world?  Was she the same Beryl; was the eternal and unchanging God over all, as of yore?  She had shattered and ruined the sparkling crystal goblet of her young life, scattering in the dust the golden wine of happy hope, in the effort to serve and comfort that loved sufferer, who, languishing on a hospital cot, had died among strangers; had been shrouded by hirelings.  That any other hand than hers had touched her sacred dead, seemed a profanation; and at the thought of the last rites rendered, the loyal child shivered as though some polluting grasp had been laid upon herself.  Out of the envelope rolled a broad hoop of reddish gold, her mother’s wedding ring; and in zigzag lines across a sheet of paper was written the last message: 

“My dear, good little girl, so faithful, so true, my legacy of love is your mother’s blessing.  You must be comforted to know I am dying in peace, because I trust in your last promise—­”

Then a blot, some unintelligible marks, and a space.  Lower still, scarcely legible characters were scrawled: 

“Tell my darling—­to wear my ring as a holy—­”

In death as in life, the last word, and the deepest feeling were not for her; the sacred souvenir was left for the hand that had so often stabbed the idolatrous heart, now stilled forever.

In all ages the ninety and nine that go not astray, never feel the caressing touch which the yearning Shepherd lays on the obstinate wanderer, who would not pasture in peace; and from the immemorial dawn of inchoate civilization, prodigals have possessed the open sesame to parental hearts that seemed barred against the more dutiful.  By what perverted organon of ethics has it come to pass in sociology, that the badge of favoritism is rarely the guerdon of merit?