rward, wasting the young girl's
powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no disposition to
take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on air. It was
remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her
features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was burning
away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs of
danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might turn
the balance which held life and death poised against each other. He
surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every opportunity
of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death to the scale of
life, as she will often do if not rudely disturbed or interfered with.

Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming to
her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village. Some
of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent her,
and her table was covered with fruits which tempted her in vain. Several
of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own handiwork,
and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint offering.
Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing to have
his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some boughs full
of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging to the stricken
trees. With these he brought also some of the already fallen leaflets of
the white ash, remarkable for their rich olive-purple color, forming a
beautiful contrast with some of the lighter-hued leaves. It so happened
that this particular tree, the white ash, did not grow upon The Mountain,
and the leaflets were more welcome for their comparative rarity. So the
girls made their basket, and the floor of it they covered with the rich
olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as they could lay their hands
upon served to fill it, and with many kindly messages they sent it to
Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and
Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever. The
school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes
for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased
Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the
flowers, and takin