AS THE HART PANTETH BY HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES. NEW YORK: COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY _G. W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_, MDCCCXCVIII. [_All rights reserved._] TO A MEMORY. CONTENTS. PAGE THE CHILD 7 THE GIRL 104 THE WOMAN 185 AS THE HART PANTETH. THE CHILD. CHAPTER I. HE sat just outside the lofty doorway, that opened between the bare hall and front verandah. The great white columns held a wild clematis vine, the leaves of which almost concealed the bricks where the plaster had fallen off. Presently a child came out with a violin in her hand. She went up to him, and laying her full cheek against his shrunken one, caressed him. Her blue eyes that went black in an instant, from the pupils’ swift dilation, had the direct gaze of one knowing nothing of the world and never fearing to be misunderstood. She was slim yet strong; her waving hair that fell softly about her face was the color of sunburnt cornsilk, her skin ovalling from it, smooth and white, like a bursting magnolia bud. “Grandpa, I can play ‘The Mocking Bird’ for you now.” “Play it, God’s child; play it,” he said. As she leaned against the column and began playing, his face, old and worn with many griefs, seemed, for a moment, rejuvenated by the spirit of his lost youth. His heart stirred strangely within him, and he was minded of another slim, little girl, who came down to the gate to meet him when the day was done in the long ago. She had the same glorious hair, and tender, fearless eyes and love for him. But that was more than forty years gone by and she was dead. As the strains became fuller and sweeter, a bird began twittering, trilling among the leaves, imitating the sounds it heard. “Listen. Do you hear that, Esther?” whispering, as he searched for a sight of the singer. “There it is. It’s a mocking bird,” he said, pointing to the young thing, as the fluting feathers on its throat stood out like the pipes of an organ. Its song, accompanying the tune, never ceased until the violin was tossed upon the bench and the child was in the old man’s arms. “That was beautiful, beautiful!” His eyes were filled with tears of enthusiasm that fell upon her hair. “Your mother used to play that, when she was young.” He spoke with the weight of profound emotion, that glowed in his eyes, and quivered on his lips. “And did the bird sing with her?” a softer look coming upon the childish face. “I don’t remember that it did, though she was always a friend to the birds that built their nests about us. She kept the boys from breaking them up or trapping them. Every spring they sang here in the trees. They seemed to know that she was looking after them. That must have been what she was born for. She was always watching over something or somebody.” He swallowed hard. “I can see her now, bending over her work, late at night, stitching away, with her fingers on those gray clothes for the boys in the army--your Uncle Billy and your father.”