s
gained from studies of the Daarg family, as developed in boys. Doro was
excused from lessons, and the hours were made pleasant to him. She spent
many a morning reading aloud to him; and old Viny stood amazed at the
variety and extravagance of the dishes ordered for him.

"What! chickens ebery day, Miss 'Lisabeet? 'Pears like Mass' Doro hab
eberyting now!"

"Theodore is ill, Lavinia," replied the mistress; and she really thought
so.

Music, however, there was none; the old charmed afternoons and evenings
were silent.

"I can not bear it," the boy had said, with trembling lips.

But one evening he did not return: the dinner waited for him in vain;
the orange after-glow faded away over the pine-barrens; and in the pale
green of the evening sky arose the star of the twilight; still he came
not.

Miss Elisabetha could eat nothing.

"Keep up the fire, Lavinia," she said, rising from the table at last.

"Keep up de fire, Miss 'Lisabeet! Till when?"

"Till Theodore comes!" replied the mistress shortly.

"De worl' mus' be coming to de end," soliloquized the old black woman,
carrying out the dishes; "sticks of wood no account!"

Late in the evening a light footstep sounded over the white path, and
the strained, watching eyes under the stone arches saw at last the face
of the missing one.

"O aunt, I have seen her--I have seen her! I thought her gone for ever.
O aunt--dear, dear aunt, she has sung for me again!" said the boy,
flinging himself down on the stones, and laying his flushed face on her
knee. "This time it was over by the old lighthouse, aunt. I was sailing
up and down in the very worst breakers I could find, half hoping they
would swamp the boat, for I thought perhaps I could forget her down
there under the water--when I saw figures moving over on the
island-beach. Something in the outlines of one made me tremble; and I
sailed over like the wind, the little boat tilted on its side within a
hair's-breadth of the water, cutting it like a knife as it flew. It was
she, aunt, and she smiled! 'What, my young Southern nightingale,' she
said, 'is it you?' And she gave me her hand--her soft little hand."

The thin fingers, hardened by much braiding of palmetto, withdrew
themselves instinctively from the boy's dark curls. He did not notice
it, but rushed on with his story unheeding:

"She let me walk with her, aunt, and hold her parasol, decked with lace,
and she took off her hat and hung it on my arm, and it