rinkled face.
After some minutes, when the paroxysm of weeping had spent itself, Dyce
took the hand, kissed it reverently, and pressed into it a package.

"The doctor tole me to put that into your hands. He said he knew it
would be very precious to you, but he felt shore he could trust me to
bring it safe. Now, honey, I know you want to be by yourself, when you
read your ma's last words. I will go and set in yonder by the fire,
till you call me. My heart aches and swells fit to bust, and I can't
stan' no more misery jest now, sech as this."

For some moments, Beryl lay motionless, then the intolerable agony
clutched her throat with an aching sense of suffocation, and she sat
up, with nerveless hands lying on the package in her lap. She was
prepared for, expectant of the worst, but the details added keener
stings to suffering that had benumbed her. At last, with a shuddering
sigh, she broke the seal, and took from folds of tissue paper, a long
thick tress of the beautiful black hair. Shaking it out of its satin
coil, she held it up, then wrapped it smoothly over her hand, and laid
it caressingly against her cheek.

Prison walls melted away; she stood again in the New York attic, and
combed, and brushed, and braided those raven locks, and saw the wan
face of the beloved invalid, and the jasmine and violets she had pinned
at her throat.

What had become of the proud, high-spirited ambitious girl, who laughed
at adverse fortune, and forgot poverty in lofty aspirations? How long
ago it seemed, since she kissed the dear faded cheek, and knelt for her
mother's farewell benediction. Was it the same world? Was she the same
Beryl; was the eternal and unchanging God over all, as of yore? She had
shattered and ruined the sparkling crystal goblet of her young life,
scattering in the dust the golden wine of happy hope, in the effort to
serve and comfort that loved sufferer, who, languishing on a hospital
cot, had died among strangers; had been shrouded by hirelings. That any
other hand than hers had touched her sacred dead, seemed a profanation;
and at the thought of the last rites rendered, the loyal child shivered
as though some polluting grasp had been laid upon herself. Out of the
envelope rolled a broad hoop of reddish gold, her mother's wedding
ring; and in zigzag lines across a sheet of paper was written the last
message:

"My dear, good little girl, so faithful, so true, my legacy of love is
your mother's blessing. You