When I took it upstairs Alice was in the room; and when she saw it, Alice wept on it, and exclaimed how like it was. Then she clasped it on my neck, and kissed me, and cried, and said how glad she was that I should have such a token of my mother; and then Alice, too, began to admonish me. "Oh! think of her sometimes, Miss Hester! Think how her young life and all her hopes were lost. It was no blame of her's, my sweet young lady! Oh! think of your mother, dear child." I was strangely shaken by all these admonitions. I did not know whether to reject this indignantly, or to sit down on the floor, and cry with mortification and annoyance. What occasion had they all to be afraid of my spirit or temper? I put away this beautiful little portrait, at last, with a vexed and sullen pain. Why did everybody preach to me on this text? I had never harmed my mother, and how could my circumstances possibly resemble those she was placed in? If this sweet, gentle smile of hers was to be a perpetual reproach to me, how could I have any pleasure in it? I was annoyed and vexed with everybody, and though in the rebound my heart clung to my father, I could not go to him to seek for sympathy. I wandered out into the garden, into the twilight, thinking with a deeper pity of his disappointed heart. I forgave him all his hard words and coldness, thinking mysteriously of the darkness which had fallen over all his life; and I could not be patient with my advisers who had been warning me by his example. How could they tell what he had suffered? What was it to them that he had looked for love, and had not found it? In imagination, I stood by my father's side, vindicating and defending, and said to myself with indignant earnestness: "Nobody shall blame him to me." I was not even satisfied with Harry. He had not answered me plainly, and he had gone away. I paced up and down the springy, fragrant grass with short, impatient steps. I forgot that the night-wind was chill, and that I had nothing to protect me from it. I was not at all in a sweet or satisfactory mood of mind; and when I thought of the continual happy smile of the miniature, it rather chafed and annoyed than calmed me. While I was thus unhappily wandering in the garden, at issue with myself and every one around, I suddenly heard a step behind, and as suddenly felt a great, soft shawl thrown over me. I resisted my first impatient impulse to throw it off, and submitted to have myself wrapped in it, and a fold of it thrown over my head like a hood--the warmth and shelter it seemed to give, had something strangely pleasant in them. I was soothed against my will--and Harry drew my arm through his, and we continued our walk in silence. It was pleasant to be taken possession of so quietly--it was pleasant to feel that some one had a right to take care of me, whether I would or no.