the care of me
between this and the grave, to bury me with my hands untouched."

The tracing of the words showed the bodily torment she was suffering, as
she wrote them on a scrap of paper found beside her pillow.

In wonder, as the dim idea grew from the waving of Clare's dead hand,
Richard paced the house, and hung about the awful room; dreading to enter
it, reluctant to quit it. The secret Clare had buried while she lived,
arose with her death. He saw it play like flame across her marble
features. The memory of her voice was like a knife at his nerves. His
coldness to her started up accusingly: her meekness was bitter blame.

On the evening of the fourth day, her mother came to him in his bedroom,
with a face so white that he asked himself if aught worse could happen to
a mother than the loss of her child. Choking she said to him, "Read
this," and thrust a leather-bound pocket-book trembling in his hand. She
would not breathe to him what it was. She entreated him not to open it
before her.

"Tell me," she said, "tell me what you think. John must not hear of it. I
have nobody to consult but you O Richard!"

"My Diary" was written in the round hand of Clare's childhood on the
first page. The first name his eye encountered was his own.

"Richard's fourteenth birthday. I have worked him a purse and put it
under his pillow, because he is going to have plenty of money. He does
not notice me now because he has a friend now, and he is ugly, but
Richard is not, and never will be."

The occurrences of that day were subsequently recorded, and a childish
prayer to God for him set down. Step by step he saw her growing mind in
his history. As she advanced in years she began to look back, and made
much of little trivial remembrances, all bearing upon him.

"We went into the fields and gathered cowslips together, and pelted each
other, and I told him he used to call them 'coals-sleeps' when he was a
baby, and he was angry at my telling him, for he does not like to be told
he was ever a baby."

He remembered the incident, and remembered his stupid scorn of her meek
affection. Little Clare! how she lived before him in her white dress and
pink ribbons, and soft dark eyes! Upstairs she was lying dead. He read
on:

"Mama says there is no one in the world like Richard, and I am sure there
is not, not in the whole world. He says he is going to be a great General
and going to the wars. If he does I shall dress myself as a boy an