eyes, but passion burning in her heart; she cried aloud in the silence with an irrepressible cry of fury and anguish--the voice of a young savage, the uncontrolled, unrestrained, absolute violence of a child. She was half crazed with the sudden downfall, the sudden injury; she could think of nothing but the sin that had been done against her, the vengeance, sharp and sudden as her passion, which she would inflict if she could. But as poor little Desirée crouched beneath the tree, not even the vehemence of her resentment could preserve her from the influences of Nature. Her little feet seemed frozen to the path; her hands were numb and powerless, and ice-cold as the frozen water beneath. The chill stole to her heart with a sickening faintness, then a gradual languor crept over her passion; by degrees she felt nothing but the cold, the sharp rustle of the branches, the chill gloom of the night, the harsh wind that blew in at her uncovered ears. Her hair fell down on her neck, and her fingers were too powerless to put it up. She had no heart to return to the house from which she fled in so violent an excess of insulted feeling--it almost seemed that she had no place in the world to go to, poor child, but this desolate winter woodland, which in its summer beauty she had associated with her mother. The night blinded her, and so did the growing sickness of extreme cold. Another moment, and poor little Desirée sank against the tree, passionless and fainting--the last thought in her heart a low outcry for her mother, who was hundreds of miles away and could not hear. The cold was still growing sharper and keener as the last glimmer of daylight faded out of the skies. She might have slid down into the frozen Tyne, as she had imagined her enemy, or she might have perished in her favorite path, in the cold which was as sharp as an Arctic frost. But Providence does not desert those poor, suffering, wicked children who fly to death’s door at the impulse of passion as Desirée did. A laborer, hastening home by the footpath through the Melmar woods, wandered out of his way, by chance, and stumbled over the poor little figure lying in the path. When the man had got over his first alarm, he lifted her up and carried her like a child--she was not much more--to Melmar, where he went to the side door and brought her in among the servants to that great kitchen, which was the most cheerful apartment in the house. The maids were kind-hearted, and liked the poor little governess--they chafed her hands and bathed her feet, and wrapped her in blankets, and, at last, brought Desirée to her senses. When she came alive again, the poor, naughty child looked round her bewildered, and did not know where she was--the place was strange to her--and it looked so bright and homely that Desirée’s poor little heart was touched by a vague contrasting sense of misery.