“I forgot to tell you,” said Aunt Susan, “that no sooner was the carriage gone for you, then Miss Evans was called to a very sick friend.  She left this note for you.”

Hugh hastily opened it, and found a line expressing regret that such summons should come at such an hour, and welcoming him home with all the warmth of a true and earnest soul.

“O father! is it not heavenly to be back again?” and the sensitive daughter fell weeping with joy into her father’s arms.  He pressed her to his heart, held her as though she had been away from him all these years, instead of at his side beholding the wonders of the Old World.  “Dawn, Dawn, my darling girl,” was all he could say.

“Where is she?” she inquired, suddenly rising.

“Who?”

“Miss Evans.  Strange I have not thought of her since we entered our home.”

“She is away.  Here is her note, which will explain her absence.”

Dawn read it without looking at the words, and said: 

“The house is full of her.  I like her sphere; she must not go away from us.”

Her father glanced wonderingly towards her.  How strangely woven into his own life was the tissue of his child’s, how vibratory had their existence become.

“Shall she not always stay, dear father?  You will need some one-some one with you.”

The last words were slow and measured.  What was it that seemed drifting from his grasp just then?  What more of joy was receding from his life-sphere?

“Dawn, my child,” he said, “You are not going from me?”

“Why, poor frightened papa, I am not so easily got rid of.  I am not going, but some one is coming, coming, I feel it, close to you, yet not one to sever us.  There are some natures that bind others closer, as some substances unite by the introduction of a third element.”

“Child, you are my very breath; how can you come closer to me?”

“By having a new set of sympathies in your being aroused; by expansion.  Was my mother farther removed or brought nearer to you, when she gave birth to a new claimant upon your love?”

“Brought nearer, and made dearer a thousand times.”

“Do you understand me now, father?”

“I feel strange to-day, Dawn.  It came over me when I left the carriage,—­a something I fain would put away, but cannot.  Some other time we will talk upon it.”

“May we come in?”

The door was flung wide open, and Florence and her husband stood before them.  The children were in the garden just at that moment.  The tea-bell rang, and soon they all formed a happy group around the bounteous board.

Revelations come to us sometimes in flashes, at others in partial glimpses.  The revelation of Hugh Wyman’s feelings towards one he had known but as a friend, came slowly.  There was no sudden lifting of the veil, which concealed the image from his sight.  It rose and fell, as though lifted by the wind,—­and that merely a chance breeze,—­no seeming hand of fate controling it.