She took her mind away with a wrench from the recollection of the past to the bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future.  Her eyes began to see, not visions of what had been, but the sight actually before her; her dear father leaning back asleep in the railway carriage.  His blue-black hair was grey now, and lay thinly over his brows.  The bones of his face were plainly to be seen—­too plainly for beauty, if his features had been less finely cut; as it was, they had a grace if not a comeliness of their own.  The face was in repose; but it was rather rest after weariness, than the serene calm of the countenance of one who led a placid, contented life.  Margaret was painfully struck by the worn, anxious expression; and she went back over the open and avowed circumstances of her father’s life, to find the cause for the lines that spoke so plainly of habitual distress and depression.

‘Poor Frederick!’ thought she, sighing.  ’Oh! if Frederick had but been a clergyman, instead of going into the navy, and being lost to us all!  I wish I knew all about it.  I never understood it from Aunt Shaw; I only knew he could not come back to England because of that terrible affair.  Poor dear papa! how sad he looks!  I am so glad I am going home, to be at hand to comfort him and mamma.

She was ready with a bright smile, in which there was not a trace of fatigue, to greet her father when he awakened.  He smiled back again, but faintly, as if it were an unusual exertion.  His face returned into its lines of habitual anxiety.  He had a trick of half-opening his mouth as if to speak, which constantly unsettled the form of the lips, and gave the face an undecided expression.  But he had the same large, soft eyes as his daughter,—­eyes which moved slowly and almost grandly round in their orbits, and were well veiled by their transparent white eyelids.  Margaret was more like him than like her mother.  Sometimes people wondered that parents so handsome should have a daughter who was so far from regularly beautiful; not beautiful at all, was occasionally said.  Her mouth was wide; no rosebud that could only open just’ enough to let out a ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and ‘an’t please you, sir.’  But the wide mouth was one soft curve of rich red lips; and the skin, if not white and fair, was of an ivory smoothness and delicacy.  If the look on her face was, in general, too dignified and reserved for one so young, now, talking to her father, it was bright as the morning,—­full of dimples, and glances that spoke of childish gladness, and boundless hope in the future.

It was the latter part of July when Margaret returned home.  The forest trees were all one dark, full, dusky green; the fern below them caught all the slanting sunbeams; the weather was sultry and broodingly still.  Margaret used to tramp along by her father’s side, crushing down the fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her light foot, and send up the fragrance peculiar to it,—­out on the