n, still
lying where she fell, she threw up her arms and wailed once or twice,
not loudly, but with a struggling, inarticulate sound, as a person cries
out in sleep. Poor old Lois! it was the last wail of her love. But even
then she did not recognize it. Nor did the priest. Pale, with uncertain
steps and shaking hands, yet tearless, the stricken woman raised herself
by the aid of the bench, crossed the piazza, went down the path and into
the street, Pere Michaux's eyes following her in bewilderment. She was
evidently going home, and her prim, angular shape looked strangely bare
and uncovered in the lack of bonnet and shawl, for through all the years
she had lived on the island she had never once been seen in the open air
without them. The precision of her bonnet strings was a matter of
conscience. The priest went away also. And thus it happened that Anne
was not told at all.

When, late in the evening, Miss Lois returned, grayly pale, but quiet,
as she entered the hall a cry met her ears and rang through the house.
It had come sooner than any one expected. The sword of sorrow, which
sooner or later must pierce all loving hearts, had entered Anne
Douglas's breast. Her father was dead.

He had died suddenly, peacefully and without pain, passing away in
sleep. Anne was with him, and Tita, jealously watchful to the last. No
one else was in the room at the moment. Pere Michaux, coming in, had
been the first to perceive the change.

Tita drew away quickly to a distant corner, and kneeling down where she
could still see everything that went on, began repeating prayers; but
Anne, with a wild cry, threw herself down beside her dead, sobbing,
holding his hand, and calling his name again and again. She would not
believe that he was gone.

Ah, well, many of us know the sorrow. A daughter's love for a kind
father is a peculiarly dependent, clinging affection; it is mixed with
the careless happiness of childhood, which can never come again. Into
the father's grave the daughter, sometimes a gray-haired woman, lays
away forever the little pet names and memories which to all the rest of
the world are but foolishness. Even though happy in her woman's lot, she
weeps convulsively here for a while with a sorrow that nothing can
comfort; no other love so protecting and unselfish will ever be hers
again.

Anne was crushed by her grief; it seemed to those who watched her that
she revealed a new nature in her sorrow. Dr. Gaston and Pere M