“Yet I fain would die! To go through life unloving and unloved; To feel that thirst and hunger of the soul We cannot still; that longing, that wild impulse, And struggle after something we have not, And cannot have; the effort to be strong; And, like the Spartan boy, to smile and smile, While secret wounds do bleed beneath our cloaks: All this the dead feel not--the dead alone! Would I were with them!” “The girl is like me. She is proud, although she is so loving. I believe she would sooner be dead than live the life that lies before her,” he said to himself. And he was right. The cold, gray, rainy dawn peeped in at the windows and saw Aline struggling slowly back to life and consciousness. She put out her hands and pushed them away from her with their restoratives. She would have none of them. She flung out her hands in despair. “You should have let me die!” she cried out, wildly. “How could any one wish for me to live?” “Oh, my darling, do not talk so!” cried her mother, forgetting everything save the passionate mother-love that filled her heart. “You must live to be my comfort when Effie is taken from me. You know she will be married soon to Dr. Anthony, and I should be so lonely, when she went were it not for you, my love!” “Oh, mamma, how can I be any comfort to you?” cried poor Aline, in despair. “You will be ashamed of me--you will never--never forget all that my willfulness has brought on me--perhaps you will hate me after awhile. If you did, mamma, I could not blame you. I quite deserve it, I know!” “Hush, my darling! How could a mother hate her child?” cried poor Mrs. Rodney, tearfully, and forgetting all her dignity in genuine mother-love. “I do not believe you are guilty, Aline! How could my little white-souled girl be a sinner? Live for me, Aline, and we will not care for the world. We will let it go by. We will not heed its smiles or its frowns.” But Aline sighed in heaviness of heart. Her trouble was too fresh, her wound was too deep for her to find comfort anywhere. “Oh, mamma, you are so good to me,” she cried. “I never knew how good before. I do not wish to live. I am proud, though you might not have thought so in the old, willful days. I cannot live such a life as my father has painted for me. I shall die like a flower that has no rain and no sunshine. And that will be best. I do not care to live!” And this was the girl who had dreamed of finding life all fair and desirable at fourscore--who had laughed at Oran Delaney’s croakings such a little, little while ago. She lay there among the snowy pillows, in the little room for which she had sighed so often, and vainly thinking that she would be so glad and happy when she returned to it once again, and she wished in her heart that she might die.