Christian fiction; Medical fiction; Scotland -- Fiction; Surgeons -- Fiction; Wingfold, Thomas (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
But the child thought within herself, "Alas, father! you have never had
any afflictions which you or I either could not bear tenfold better than
what I have to bear." She was perhaps right. Only she did not know that
when she got through, all would be transfigured with the light of her
resurrection, just as her father's poverty now was in the light of his
plenty.
Little more passed between them in the street. All the way to the
entrance of the park they were silent. There they exchanged a few words
with the sweet-faced little dwarf-woman that opened the gate, and those
few words set the currents of their thoughts singing yet more sweetly as
they flowed. They entered the great park, through the trees that
bordered it, still in silence, but when they reached the wide expanse of
grass, with its clumps of trees and thickets, simultaneously they
breathed a deep breath of the sweet wind, and the fountains of their
deeps were broken up. The evening was lovely, they wandered about long
in delight, and much was the trustful converse they held. It was getting
dark before they thought of returning.
The father had been telling the daughter how he had mourned and wept
when his boys were taken from him, never thinking at all of the girl who
was left him.
"And now," he said, "I would not part with my Dorothy to have them back
the finest boys in the world. What would my old age be without you, my
darling?"
Dorothy's heart beat high. Surely there must be a Father in heaven too!
They walked a while in a great silence, for the heart of each was full.
And all the time scarce an allusion had been made to the money.
As they returned they passed the new house, at some distance, on the
highest point in the park. It stood unfinished, with all its windows
boarded up.
"The walls of that house," said Mr. Drake, "were scarcely above ground
when I came to Glaston. So they had been for twenty years, and so they
remained until, as you remember, the building was recommenced some three
or four years ago. Now, again, it is forsaken, and only the wind is at
home in it."
"They tell me the estate is for sale," said Dorothy. "Those
building-lots, just where the lane leads into Pine street, I fancy
belong to it."
"I wish," returned her father, "they would sell me that tumble-down
place in the hollow they call the Old House of Glaston. I shouldn't mind
paying a good sum for it. What a place it would be to live in! And what
a pleasure there would be in the making of it once more habitable, and
watching order dawn out of neglect!"
"It would be delightful," responded Dorothy. "When I was a child, it
was one of my dreams that that house was my papa's--with the wild garden
and all the fruit, and the terrible lake, and the ghost of the lady that
goes about in the sack she was drowned in. But would you really buy it,
father, if you could get it?"
"I think I should, Dorothy," answered Mr. Drake.
"Would it not be damp--so much in the hollow? Is it not the lowest spot
in the park?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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