From one of the luxuriously furnished chambers of her father's elegant mansion, Jenny Lincoln looked mournfully out upon the thick angry clouds, which, the livelong day, had obscured the winter sky. Dreamily for a while she listened to the patter of the rain as it fell upon the deserted pavement below, and then, with a long, deep sigh, she turned away and wept. Poor Jenny!--the day was rainy, and dark, and dreary, but darker far were the shadows stealing over her pathway. Turn which way she would, there was not one ray of sunshine, which even her buoyant spirits could gather from the surrounding gloom. Her only sister was slowly, but surely dying, and when Jenny thought of this she felt that if Rose could only live, she'd try and bear the rest; try to forget how much she loved William Bender, who that morning had honorably and manfully asked her of her parents, and been spurned with contempt,--not by her father, for could he have followed the dictates of his better judgment, he would willingly have given his daughter to the care of one who he knew would carefully shield her from the storms of life. It was not he, but the cold, proud mother, who so haughtily refused William's request, accusing him of taking underhanded means to win her daughter's affections. "I had rather see you dead!" said the stony-hearted woman, when Jenny knelt at her feet, and pleaded for her to take back the words she had spoken--"I had rather see you dead, than married to such as _he_. I mean what I have said, and you will never be his." Jenny knew William too well to think he would ever sanction an act of disobedience to her mother, and her heart grew faint, and her eyes dim with tears, as she thought of conquering the love which had grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength. There was another reason, too, why Jenny should weep as she sat there alone in her room. From her father she had heard of all that was to happen. The luxuries to which all her life she had been accustomed, were to be hers no longer. The pleasant country house in Chicopee, dearer far than her city home, must be sold, and nowhere in the wide world, was there a place for them to rest. It was of all this that Jenny was thinking that dreary afternoon; and when at last she turned away from the window, her thoughts went back again to her sister, and she murmured, "If _she_ could only live." But it could not be;--the fiat had gone forth, and Rose, like the fair summer flower whose name she bore, must fade and pass away. For several days after Mrs. Russell's party she tried to keep up, but the laws of nature had been outraged, and now she lay all day in a darkened room, moaning with pain, and wondering why the faces of those around her were so sad and mournful. "Jenny," said she one day when the physician, as usual, had left the room without a word of encouragement--"Jenny, what does make you look so blue and forlorn. I hope you don't fancy I'm going to die? Of course I'm not."