Now, after the lapse of years, when her educational course was almost finished, she recalled every word and look and gesture; even the thrill of horror that shook her limbs when she kissed the lips that death had sealed an hour before.  Mournfully vivid was her recollection of her tenth birthday, for then he had bought her a blue ribbon for her hair, and a little china cup and saucer; and now tears sprang to her eyes as she murmured:  “I have studied hard and the triumph is at hand, but I have nobody to be proud of me now!  Ah Grandpa! if you could only come back to me, your little Pearl!  It is so desolate to be alone in this great world; so hard to have to know that nobody cares specially whether I live or die, whether I succeed or fail ignominiously.  I have only myself to live for; only my own heart and will to sustain and stimulate me.”

Through the fringy acacias that waved their long hair across the hothouse windows, the golden sunshine flickered over the graceful, rounded, lithe figure of the orphan—­over the fair young face with its delicate cameo features, warm, healthful coloring, and brave, hopeful expression.  Four years had developed the pretty, sad-eyed child into a lovely woman, with a pure heart filled with humble unostentatious piety, and a clear, vigorous intellect inured to study, and ambitious of every honorable eminence within the grasp of true womanhood.

Edna had endeavored to realize and remember what her Bible first taught her, and what moralists of all creeds, climes and ages, had reiterated—­that human life was at best but “vanity and vexation of spirit,” that “man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward”; yet as she stood on the line, narrow and thin as Al-Sirat, that divides girlhood and womanhood, all seemed to her fresh, pure heart as inviting and bewitching as the magnificent panorama upon which enraptured lotophagi gazed from the ancient acropolis of Cyrene.

As Edna turned to leave the hothouse, the ring of horse’s hoofs on the rocky walk attracted her attention, and a moment after, Mr. Leigh gave his horse to the gardener and came to meet her.

“Good morning, Miss Edna.  As I am bearer of dispatches from my sister to Mrs. Murray, I have invited myself to breakfast with you.”

“You are an earlier riser than I had supposed, Mr. Leigh, from your lamentations over your exercises.”

“I do not deny that I love my morning nap, and generally indulge myself; for, like Sydney Smith, ’I can easily make up my mind to rise early, but I cannot make up my body.’  In one respect I certainly claim equality with Thorwaldsen, my ‘talent for sleeping’ is inferior neither to his nor Goethe’s.  Do you know that we are both to have a holiday to-day?”

“No, sir; upon what score?”

“It happens to be my birthday as well as yours, and as my sister, Mrs. Inge, gives a party to-night in honor of the event, I have come to insist that my classmate shall enjoy the same reprieve that I promise myself.  Mrs. Inge commissioned me to insure your presence at her party.”