of Queen Mary, to which,
when my mother stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong that the
by-standers clustered about her, whispering curiously. "Ah, mon Dieu!"
said a little Frenchman aloud, "c'est une resurrection."

We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and Winthrop and I; for the
spirit of her own excitement had made us completely wild. Winthrop's
scream of delight, when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught the first
sight of the old yellow coach, might have been heard a quarter of a
mile.

"Coming?" said mother, nervously, and stepped out to the gate, full in
the sunlight that crowned her like royal gold.

The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.

"Why, she hasn't come!" All the eager color died out of her face. "I am
so disappointed!"--speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly
into the house.

Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,--I was the
oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us,
instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my
years were. "Sarah, I don't understand. You think she might have lost
the train? But Alice is so punctual. Alice never lost a train. And she
said she would come." And then, a while after, "I _don't_ understand."

It was not like my mother to worry. The next day the coach lumbered up
and rattled past, and did not stop,--and the next, and the next.

"We shall have a letter," mother said, her eyes saddening every
afternoon. But we had no letter. And another day went by, and another.

"She is sick," we said; and mother wrote to her, and watched for the
lumbering coach, and grew silent day by day. But to the letter there was
no answer.

Ten days passed. Mother came to me one afternoon to ask for her pen,
which I had borrowed. Something in her face troubled me vaguely.

"What are you going to do, mother?"

"Write to your aunt's boarding-place. I can't bear this any longer." She
spoke sharply. She had already grown unlike herself.

She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of mail.

It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked for it. I came home
early from school. Mother was sewing at the parlor window, her eyes
wandering from her work, up the road. It was an ugly day. It had rained
drearily from eight o'clock till two, and closed in suffocating mist,
creeping and dense and chill. It gave me a childish fancy of long-closed
tombs and low-land graveyards, as I walked home in