," returned Mrs. Richardson in her kind,
comforting voice; and she drew the dark head to her shoulder, and a
sort of wonder filled her eyes as she saw the glossy lengths of hair
that swept the floor.

To an onlooker Mrs. Richardson might have seemed a somewhat grotesque
figure in her quilted magenta silk dressing-gown, with her gray fringe
pinned up by her maid in little twists and rolls, but her honest eyes
beamed with kindness and sympathy.

"Oh, I have been so wicked!" repeated Leah. "All these months I have
been praying that he might not suffer as I have been suffering, and
that in time he might forget me and be happy; and yet, because my
prayer has been answered, and that girl is helping him to forget, I
felt as though I hated her;" and then she hid her face in the folds of
the gaudy dressing-gown and shed tears of bitter shame and
self-loathing.

"My dear, if you cry so you will make yourself ill," observed Mrs.
Richardson soothingly. "You have been sorely tried, you poor child, but
you are not wicked; on the contrary, I think few girls have behaved so
well. Do not call yourself names, dearie; Mrs. Godfrey and I both think
you good, and we mean to do our best to make you happy."

"Yes, and I am so grateful to you both, you dear, dear friends," and
Leah raised her tear-stained face and kissed her with all the warmth of
her loving nature. What was it to her that Mrs. Richardson was an
odd-looking, eccentric old lady, whose curled gray fringe and gay
attire scarcely harmonised with her homely, weather-beaten features; to
Leah her face was transfigured by the loveliness of a kind and tender
nature. "I think I saw her as the angels did," she said long years
afterwards to one who had served for her as Jacob did for his beloved
Rachel; "for I loved every line of her dear homely face. Oh, how she
mothered me, who had never known mother love, and how good and patient
she was with me in my bad times! If God had not taken her, I could
never have left her--never!" For when Mrs. Richardson died some years
later, her hand was locked in that of her adopted daughter.

Leah drooped for some time after this encounter. Then, as the summer
went on, she recovered her spirits gradually; new duties and interests
demanded her attention, and in the wholesome and active life led by the
mistress of Sandy Hollow she found plenty to distract her sad thoughts.

Mrs. Richardson was a great gardener, and on warm days she spent most
of her