bewildered gaze--what?
good God! is it possible? Neatly lined is the box, and lying therein--a
cross! the same which the Sea-flower had wrought with her own hands, and
given her father when she saw him last! Carved at the head of the cross
are these words,--"You will soon come to me again; then you will never
leave us;" the child's last words to her father. O, how did they fall
upon her heart now! It seemed as if he were speaking to her from the
skies, and unconsciously she looked upward, as if she might indeed catch
the tones of her father's voice, bidding her come away. "We will come,"
she softly whispered, "we shall soon be with you there;" and turning to
her mother, she added,--"it is not far, that better land; we may hear
their glad shouts, if we will listen."

Over that cross, emblematic of the Lamb who was slain that we might
live, was shed tears from a widow's heart; but those tears were not of
mourning for the departed, for through her who was made but a little
lower than the angels, those tears had been turned into joy. The child
who had ever walked in that narrow way, as if it were the only path in
which the children of earth might tread, had taught her bereaved mother,
that those precious words from the book of life, which she had ever
recognized, but had not strength to cling thereto in the hour of trial,
were truly Christ's words of tenderness; she could now smile upon the
chastening rod. Those dying words, as it were of him who had gone, were
as balm to the heart of Mrs. Grosvenor and the Sea-flower, for what
could be more dreadful than that they should never learn of his last
moments? But to Harry, who had been just upon the point of asking for
his father, it was as the dark funeral pall to his soul, and he
staggered to a chair.

"Where is my father?" he asked, in a hollow voice.

"In Heaven!" was the response of the Sea-flower.

There was silence in that house. Sorrow, which had reigned for a time
around that hearthstone, still lingered, striving to supersede the joy
which must go hand in hand with purity; but its icy touch was to be of
gentler mien, its cold, cold breath mingling with that of more genial
spheres, helping to swell the--"Father, thy will be done." This was a
dreadful announcement to Harry, a stroke which he was not prepared to
receive; and now did the past come to his remembrance with sickening
frenzy. That terrific night!--he had, at the peril of his life, implored
that heartless be