A storm indeed had passed over our house, but a storm that had not purified and cleared the atmosphere, only left it more close and sultry than before; the black sky, indeed, had brightened again, leaving comparative sunshine overhead, but threatening clouds still lingered around the horizon, and distant rumbling still warned of danger. I missed more than I had fancied possible, my little companion and pupil. No hour in the day but brought some fresh souvenir of the tortured young life that had ended its penance so early, the shrinking little soul that had been released so soon. It was not seldom, in those dark days, that I thought, with something like envy, of the peace she had inherited, and with something like repining of my lonely lot. How many years of warfare might stretch between me and the end; how many chances that I might fail or faint, grow weary, or yield to sin; while the little child I had so long looked upon with pity, so long tried to help and guide, now redeemed and safe, and everlastingly at peace, had passed "the golden portals of the City of the Blest." Good angels had pitied her, struggling and bewildered on her way, and lifting her in their arms, had carried her home; floating through the blue ether, in a moment of time she had passed the rough and weary road that would have taken a lifetime to have traversed alone. But no angels, it seemed to me, looked on my weary path; no sympathy, from heaven or of men, came to help me as I pressed on alone. Parting and death, repentance and self-accusation made that Lent a time of heartfelt sorrow; and before Easter-week was over, the low fever that had been hanging about me since the spring began, accomplished its errand, and laid me on a tedious bed of sickness. Is there any one who has ever been sick "away from home," among strangers, courteous and attentive, perhaps, but whose courtesy and attention were of duty, not love, that cannot understand what it was to be lying, day after day, in a "home" like mine, knowing it was the only one I had a right to, or a hope of, this side heaven, and knowing, through all the exaggerating excitement of fever, and the languid hopelessness of slow convalescence, that in it there was no one to whom the care of me was not a penance, that no hour was so grudged as that spent by my bedside? Cold faces met me when I waked from my feverish, troubled sleep, commonplace, unsympathetic voices fell upon my ear, when, unnerved and childish, I longed for nothing so much as for a kind word or a caressing touch. They were very attentive; I had every care; my recovery was as rapid as the doctor wished; it had not been a very alarming illness; nobody was particularly excited about it. They said it was a "light case," and I could not be doing better. They had a right to know, certainly; but oh! the weariness of that dark room, the length of those spring days, the stillness of those warm nights, the loathing of those city sounds, the longing for the country!