But, pleasant as were my noon rests, my homeward walks were pleasanter still. The dream-girl, after being awake for long hours to the practical duties of life, loved to ramble alone, till she felt herself involved in the soft haziness of thought, which was to the soul what the blue mistiness was to the distant hills. I could wander then alone to the churchyard, and yield myself unmolested to the sacred influences of memory. Do you remember my asking Richard Clyde to plant a white rose by my mother's grave? He had done so, soon after her burial, and now, when rather more than a year had passed, it was putting forth fair buds and blossoms, and breathing of renovation over the ruins of life. I never saw this rose-tree without blessing the hand which planted it; and I loved to sit on the waving grass and listen to the soft summer wind stealing through it, rustling among the dry blades and whispering with the green ones. There was one sentence that fell from my mother's dying lips which ever came to me in the sighs of the gale, fraught with mournful mystery. "Because man was _false_, I dared to think God was unjust." And had she not adjured me by every precious and every solemn consideration, "to forgive the _living_, if living _he_ indeed was?" I knew these words referred to my father; and what a history of wrong and sorrow was left for my imagination to fill up! Living!--my father living! Oh! there is no grave so deep as that dug by the hand of neglect or desertion! He had been dead to my mother,--he had been dead to me. I shuddered at the thought of breathing the same vital element. He who had broken a mother's heart must be a fiend, worthy of eternal abhorrence. "If you live to years of womanhood," said my expiring mother, "and your heart awakens to love, as alas for woman's destiny it will, then read my life's sad experience, and be warned by my example." Sad prophetess! Death has consecrated thy prediction, but it is yet unfulfilled. When will womanhood commence, on whose horizon the morning star of love is to rise in clouded lustre? Surely I am invested with a woman's dignity, in that great arm-chair, behind the green-covered desk. I feel very much like a blown rose, surrounded by the rose-bud garland of childhood. Yet Dr. Harlowe calls me "little girl," and Mr. Regulus "my child," when the pupils are not by; then it is "Miss Gabriella." They forget that I am sixteen, and that I have grown taller and more womanly in the last year; but the awakening heart has not yet throbbed at its dawning destiny, the day-star of love has not risen on its slumbers. CHAPTER XIII. "I wish you had a vacation too," said Richard Clyde, as we ascended together the winding hill. "Then we should not have these pleasant walks," I answered. "Why not?" "Why, I should not be returning from school at this hour every day, and you would not happen to overtake me as you do now."