saw such a splendid fire for toasting muffins before in
my life! Rum-dum-diddy-iddy-dum-dee, dum-diddy-iddy-dum!" And Zack fell
on his knees at the fireplace, humming "Rule Britannia," and toasting
his first muffin in triumph; utterly forgetting that he had left
Madonna's drawing lying neglected, with its face downwards, on the end
of Mrs. Blyth's couch.

Valentine, who in the innocence of his heart suspected nothing, burst
out laughing at this new specimen of Zack's inveterate flightiness.
His kind instincts, however, guided his hand at the same moment to the
drawing. He took it up carefully, and placed it on a low bookcase at
the opposite side of the room. If any increase had been possible in his
wife's affection for him, she would have loved him better than ever at
the moment when he performed that one little action.

As her husband removed the drawing, Mrs. Blyth looked at Madonna. The
poor girl stood shrinking close to the couch, with her hands clasped
tightly together in front of her, and with no trace of their natural
lovely color left on her cheeks. Her eyes followed Valentine listlessly
to the bookcase, then turned towards Zack, not reproachfully nor
angrily--not even tearfully--but again with that same look of patient
sadness, of gentle resignation to sorrow, which used to mark their
expression so tenderly in the days of her bondage among the mountebanks
of the traveling circus. So she stood, looking towards the fireplace and
the figure kneeling at it, bearing her new disappointment just as she
had borne many a former mortification that had tried her sorely while
she was yet a little child. How carefully she had labored at that
neglected drawing in the secrecy of her own room! How happy she had been
in anticipating the moment when it would be given to young Thorpe;
in imagining what he would say on receiving it, and how he would
communicate his thanks to her; in wondering what he would do with it
when he got it: where he would hang it, and whether he would often look
at his present after he had got used to seeing it on the wall! Thoughts
such as these had made the moment of presenting that drawing the moment
of a great event in her life--and there it was now, placed on one side
by other hands than the hands into which it had been given; laid down
carelessly at the mere entrance of a servant with a tea-tray; neglected
for the childish pleasure of kneeling on the hearth-rug, and toasting a
muffin at a clear co