Three years from the spring when the weeping children had gathered around their mother’s grave, they stood together in the church-yard again, and saw the dust and the sod heaped over the dead body of their father. I would not say that it was not with much sorrowing, with many tears, that Delle had nursed him through his death-sickness; that it was not with love and a martyr’s patient endurance she had ministered to his numberless wants; but I should be _far_ wrong (and you will not impute it to her sin) were I to say that it was the same great sorrow which had bowed and well-nigh crushed her gentle spirit when her mother died, that brought forth those tears when she stood by her father’s death-bed. He was her father; she remembered with affectionate gratitude the days of old, when he was to his children a parent indeed, when he had been the tender and devoted husband of his wife; but even _that_ remembrance was not strong enough to obliterate all recollection of the recent past; and I say it was not in her nature, nor, indeed, in human nature at all, to mourn _very_ deeply over _such_ a man. It was _not_ with such a dreadful sense of bereavement that she followed him to the grave, as had once before swept over her. The “cloud had spent its fury” upon her, the bolt had fallen the day her worshiped mother died. The children returned to their home, orphaned—four of them dependent on the exertions of that frail young creature on whom only the sun of sixteen years was beaming. There were no friends on whom they might depend, for their mother’s relatives lived somewhere in the far South; and had Delle even known _where_ they lived, there was far too much independence and self-reliance in her nature to impose on them the maintenance of five strange children, which she felt could not be a very agreeable accession to any family; and her heart was so filled with almost _parental_ affection for those young beings, that she could not bear to think of subjecting them to the possible hard treatment of unsympathizing relatives.