nning, Eloise counted, too, her lovers; but she spurned them so gayly
that her hard heart became a proverb through all the region round,
wherever the rejected travelled. It is true that Mr. Erne had often
expressed his film of dissatisfaction with the conventual results, and
had planned an attack on matters of more solid learning; but, tricksy as
a sprite, Eloise had escaped his designs, broken through his
regulations, implored, just out of shackles, a year's gambol in liberty,
and had made herself too charming to be resisted in her plea; and if,
feeling his health fail, he had at first insisted,--in the fear that
there might be left but brief opportunity for him to make her pleasure,
he yielded. Nevertheless, with the best outlay in the world,
plantation-life is not all a gala, and there were, it must be confessed,
certain ennuisome moments in which Eloise made inroads on her father's
library, chiefly in wild out-of-the-way veins, all which, however,
romantic, unsystematic, and undigested, did nothing towards rendering
her one whit more independent of the world in time of future trial.

One afternoon, just reentering the house from some gay farewell of
friends, she found her father sitting in the hall, and she stood
tiptoing in the door-way while smiling at him, with a fragrant vine half
twisted in her dark drooping hair, the heat making her cheek yet paler,
and the great blue-green eyes shining at him from under the black
straight brows, like aquamarine jewels. Mr. Erne leaned forward in the
chair, with hands clasped upon his knees, and eyes upbent.

"Eloise! Eloise!" he cried in a piercing voice, then grew white, and
fell back in the cushions.

The girl flew to him, took the head upon her shoulder, caressed the
deathly face, warmed the mouth with her own.

"Child!" he murmured, "I thought it was your mother!"

And by midnight, alone, and in the dark, he died, and went to find that
mother.

As for Eloise, she was like some one made dumb by a thunderbolt. Her
garden had become a desert. Ice had fallen in her summer. Death was too
large a fact for her to comprehend. She had seen the Medusa's head in
its terror, but not in its loveliness, and been stricken to stone. At
length in the heart of that stone the inner fountains broke,--broke in
rains of tempestuous tears, such gusts and gushes of grief as threatened
to wash away life itself; and when Eloise issued from this stormy deep,
the warmth and the wealth of being