e throat, but gave, besides, a dreadful air of
smartness to the poor corpse. Above the sunken chest the arms were
crossed, but, over them, and over the thin hands, in a burning, shining
mass of resplendent colour lay--

The husband held the lamp nearer, and bent his dull, red face to peer
closer at the scattered heap--the miracle of bronze and red, red living
gold. "Hello!" he said again, then moved the lamp to let its light
shine on his daughter's face, and stared at her.

"Hello!"

"I ha'n't got no one now to carl my ringolets," the child sobbed, her
voice rising high in the scale of rebellious misery; "my ringolets
ain't no good to me no more. I ha' cut 'em off; mother, she kin have
'em. They ain't no good ter me."

The glare of the lamp held awry was upon the broad red face of the girl
with the streaming, yellow eyes, with the unevenly cropped head.

"I thought yu was the boy Jim," her father said.

PINK CARNATIONS

"You see, they are my lucky flowers," she said. "I can't very well wear
them on my wedding-dress, but I'm to have some to go away with. Jack's
going to bring them down from town with him to-night."

I asked of Daphne, who had been the favourite of fortune from her
birth, in whose cup of sweet no bitter had ever mingled, who had walked
for all her happy days along a flowery path, what she meant by such
nonsense.

She was ready enough to give me her absurd girlish reasons.

What she told me was the feeblest folly, of course; but even silly
superstition must be pardoned to such a pretty person; and the words of
a young woman who is going to be married on the morrow must be treated
by a hopeless spinster, I suppose, with, at least, a semblance of
respect. There had been an occasion, it seemed, long ago in her
childhood, when she, having lost from her neck a locket which held her
dead father's portrait, had found it, all search for it having ceased,
on the carnation-bed where she had stooped to pick a flower. On the day
that the news reached them that Hugh, her brother, had won the hurdle
race at Cambridge (one of the chief triumphs, it appeared, of her
eventless life) she had just finished arranging a vase of pink
carnations for her dressing-table. Once, when her mother had been
seriously ill and there had been a fear the disease from which she
suffered was going to take a dangerous turn, she, Daphne, had been
frightened and very unhappy. Longing for, yet dreading the doctor's
arrival, s