Gently he drew her arms from his neck, and took her face in his soft palms.  He looked at her a moment, sadly and earnestly, as if striving to fix her features in the frame of memory; then bent his head and pressed a long kiss on her lips.  She put out her hands, but he had gone, and, sinking down on the step, she hid her face in her arms.  A pall seemed suddenly thrown over the future, and the orphaned heart shrank back from the lonely path where only specters were visible.  Never before had she realized how dear he was to her, how large a share of her love he possessed, and now the prospect of a long, perhaps final separation, filled her with a shivering, horrible dread.  We have seen that self-reliance was a powerful element in her character, and she had learned, from painful necessity, to depend as little as possible upon the sympathies of others; but in this hour of anguish a sense of joyless isolation conquered; her proud soul bowed down beneath the weight of intolerable grief, and acknowledged itself not wholly independent of the love and presence of her guardian.

Beulah went back to her desk, and, with tearless eyes, began the allotted task of writing.  The article was due, and must be finished; was there not a long, dark future in which to mourn?  The sketch was designed to prove that woman’s happiness was not necessarily dependent on marriage.  That a single life might be more useful, more tranquil, more unselfish.  Beulah had painted her heroine in glowing tints, and triumphantly proved her theory correct, while to female influence she awarded a sphere (exclusive of rostrums and all political arenas) wide as the universe and high as heaven.  Weary work it all seemed to her now; but she wrote on and on, and finally the last page was copied and the last punctuation mark affixed.  She wrapped up the manuscript, directed it to the editor, and then the pen fell from her nerveless fingers and her head went down, with a wailing cry, on her desk.  There the morning sun flashed upon a white face, tear-stained and full of keen anguish.  How her readers would have marveled at the sight!  Ah, “Verily the heart knoweth its own bitterness.”

CHAPTER XXXII.

One afternoon in the following week Mrs. Williams sat wrapped up in the hall, watching Beulah’s movements in the yard at the rear of the house.  The whitewashed paling was covered with luxuriant raspberry vines, and in one corner of the garden was a bed of strawberry plants.  Over this bed Beulah was bending with a basket nearly filled with the ripe scarlet berries.  Stooping close to the plants she saw only the fruit she was engaged in picking; and when the basket was quite full she was suddenly startled by a merry laugh and a pair of hands clasped over her eyes.

“Who blindfolds me?” said she.

“Guess, you solemn witch!”

“Why, Georgia, of course.”

The hands were removed, and Georgia Asbury’s merry face greeted her.