She placed in my hand a small vase of creamy white, with a band of gold around it, and on its side a bunch of blue forget-me-nots, in the centre of which were two hearts transfixed with a golden arrow. “It will make me happy to know this is on his grave when I am so far away,” she added; “and, Ettie, don’t tell any one, but last night, when everybody was asleep, I went there and planted a little rosebush like that tree in the garden, you know. I am sure it will live, for it had a good root, and I want you to water it and nurse it to life, and when they put up the stone don’t let them trample it down. Will you do this for me?” I promised that I would, and she went on: “Some time when I am older and have money I shall come back to see his grave. You’ll have it nice for me, won’t you?” I promised her again, and then, taking the scissors from the table, she cut from the back of her head one of her long, bright curls, and laying it in my hands bade me keep it as a remembrance of her. “Mother is coming and you must go,” she said, with a little shiver, as we heard Mrs. Fordham’s voice below, and with a hurried kiss and the whispered words, “Remember about the grave, good-by, I shall see you again some time, and possibly write to you,” she pushed me toward the door, and when I saw her again she was waving her hand to me from the window of the car which took her away from Hampstead. CHAPTER V. EDITH LYLE. It was a dark, dreary, January afternoon, and the dreariness and darkness were increased by the dense fog which since noon had settled like a pall over the great city of London, and by a pitiless rain, which, mixing with melting snow, ran in muddy puddles down the gutters and in dirty streams down the windows of the third floor back room of the lodging in Dorset Street, where a very young girl was lying. Her face was whiter than the pillow against which it lay, and in the eyes there was a look of utter helplessness, as if all life, and hope, and energy had been crushed out, and there was nothing left but apathy and utter indifference to the future. And yet this was the same face which Colonel Schuyler had seen framed in a net-work of green, and of whose bright beauty he had dreamed, with his lady wife beside him: but he would not have known it now. Months of mental anguish and continual combat with the mother’s stronger nature, added to days of intense suffering, and homesickness, and longing for the dead in that far-off grave in Hampstead, had left their marks on the young girl, until now that the crisis was past she lay quiet and passive in her mother’s hands and seemed to assent to whatever the mother proposed.