erself, and came to me, and took my hand.

"I wish I could comfort you!" she said, in her kind simple way.

"Keep my hand in your hand," I told her; "I am drowning in dark
water--and I have nothing to hold by but you."

"Oh, my darling, don't talk in that way!"

"Good Selina! dear Selina! You shall talk to me. Say something
harmless--tell me a melancholy story--try to make me cry."

My poor little friend looked sadly bewildered.

"I'm more likely to cry myself," she said. "This is so heart-breaking--I
almost wish I was back in the time, before you came home, the time
when your detestable sister first showed how she hated me. I was happy,
meanly happy, in the spiteful enjoyment of provoking her. Oh, Euneece,
I shall never recover my spirits again! All the pity in the world would
not be pity enough for _you_. So hardly treated! so young! so forlorn!
Your good father too ill to help you; your poor mother--"

I interrupted her; she had interested me in something better than my own
wretched self. I asked directly if she had known my mother.

"My dear child, I never even saw her!"

"Has my father never spoken to you about her?"

"Only once, when I asked him how long she had been dead. He told me you
lost her while you were an infant, and he told me no more. I was looking
at her portrait in the study, only yesterday. I think it must be a bad
portrait; your mother's face disappoints me."

I had arrived at the same conclusion years since. But I shrank from
confessing it.

"At any rate," Selina continued, "you are not like her. Nobody would
ever guess that you were the child of that lady, with the long slanting
forehead and the restless look in her eyes."

What Selina had said of me and my mother's portrait, other friends had
said. There was nothing that I know of to interest me in hearing it
repeated--and yet it set me pondering on the want of resemblance between
my mother's face and mine, and wondering (not for the first time) what
sort of woman my mother was. When my father speaks of her, no words of
praise that he can utter seem to be good enough for her. Oh, me, I wish
I was a little more like my mother!

It began to get dark; Maria brought in the lamp. The sudden brightness
of the flame struck my aching eyes, as if it had been a blow from a
knife. I was obliged to hide my face in my handkerchief. Compassionate
Selina entreated me to go to bed. "Rest your poor eyes, my child, and
your weary head--and try at l