ere, and then Master Louis was
off to West Point, and in two years more his brother, and one day--it
seemed the next day but two or three!--we were packing Master
Stanchon's trunk to go to Yale College, where his father went! We
rubbed our eyes and sat alone, and there was the macaw she got for her
tenth birthday looking at us! And I do assure you, I felt much the
same as ever. Which I had heard people say, as a girl, and felt to be
unbecoming.

The Colonel was pretty nigh to white hair, but firm and strong, and she
was grey, but not a wrinkle, and very beautiful. He was to leave the
service and had been offered a post in government, somehow, at
Washington, when just as we were beginning to worry if his eyes could
stand the book-work, the lawyer's letter came.

It seemed too good to be true. Old, crabbed Mr. Hawkes was long ago
dead, and The Cedars closed, and his heir, a very curious woman, had
felt that Miss Lisbet was defrauded, and left everything to her in her
will! So we were to go back, and it cleared so many worries that we
cried together.

"And now, Rhoda, now for a chance to do something!" she says, suddenly.

I only stared at her.

"Why, Miss Lisbet, you've been doing since you were born!" I cried.

"Oh, Rhoda, you know!" she says, coaxing, "only for those near me, and
in such a small way! Now the boys are started, and no more worry for
the Colonel, and you and I can do something that will last!"

And laughing like a girl, if she didn't fly out to the garden and find
our frost-bitten, yellow larkspur, the last!

"See!" says she, and began to wave it.

"Oh, don't, don't!" says I, anxious-like, "and you to be a grandmother
next year, maybe!" (for Louis was to be married to a New York young
lady in the winter).

But she would, and when she asked, half laughing, half frightened:

"_Am I to do what I have longed for all my life, at last?_" and
stripped off the rotting blossoms, _yes, no, yes, no_--the last one
fell.

And before ever we reached The Cedars the Colonel had gone blind!

Well, for five years she was never from his side one half hour at a
time. He said he blessed the blindness that gave him her hand at every
moment, and it was a beautiful sight to see them together. Riches
makes such an affliction as light as it can ever be, that's certain,
and he lived in luxury. He held Louis's twin daughters in his arms and
hoped to "see," as he called it, smiling, the next brother's, but it