But amid all the toils and privations of her lot, her cheerfulness and serene temper remained unclouded—her patience unshaken—her trust and faith in her heavenly Father’s love and goodness, calm and unfaltering. Nor, helpless and often querulous through weariness and suffering as her father was, did she ever fail toward him in her task of duty, or in the constancy of her affection. He only, of the dear household band, remained to her; and the devotion she felt for him absorbed the whole of her being, except that higher sentiment which belonged to Him who had breathed into her an immortal spirit. Her own frail and delicate appearance told, however, that the soul’s struggle for resignation and cheerfulness, though successful, had too terribly shaken the physical frame, ever to permit the flush of health and joy to invigorate it again. Short and quick, after every exertion, came the labored breath, and the slightest fatigue or emotion dyed the fair cheek with that brilliant hue, which they who know its fatal warning, tremble to behold. CHAPTER III The small apartment occupied by Rosalie and her father, though scrupulously neat and clean, was almost bare of furniture. A few necessary and very simple articles it contained, and nothing else, beside the lovely wax flowers upon the table, worthy of observation, except the tall and thriving rose-tree, whose bursting buds, fast unfolding into full-blown flowers, were consecrated to the memory of the departed. It was growing in the graceful Wedgwood vase in which the little Adalia had planted it, and before the recess of the window where it stood hung a curtain so thin as not to exclude the air, while it answered the design for which it was intended, to screen it from the curious eye of casual visitors. This curtain was now drawn aside, revealing the graceful plant in its flush of beauty, and as Rosalie sat moulding the plastic wax into exquisite floral forms with her delicate fingers, she often turned her eyes from the still and deathlike features of her father to its green branches, drooping with the weight of their clustered buds, and a sad and tender smile would linger on her lips, and a dewy lustre moisten her soft, hazel eye as she gazed—while at times some secret thought framed itself into words, and fell in broken murmurs from her tongue. At last she rose, and advancing to the tree, lifted a trailing branch, and wound it round a stronger one for support, tears like dew-drops falling upon its bright buds as she said— “Yes, dear mamma, the rose-tree our Adalia planted, and which you loved, is blooming for you, and once again your daughter’s hand will strew its leaves over your snowy bed. Once more! but another year—and who will shed them there? Ah! it matters not—we shall ere then be reunited where brighter flowers than those of earth will bloom for us eternally.”