For the absence of human
companionship in bestial forms; the loss of green fields, free to her
as to the winds of heaven, and of country sounds and odours; and an
almost constant sense of oppression from the propinquity of one or
another whom she had cause to fear, were speedily working sad effects
upon her. The little colour she had died out of her cheek. Her face
grew thin, and her blue eyes looked wistful and large out of their
sulken cells. Not often were tears to be seen in them now, and yet they
looked well acquainted with tears--like fountains that had been full
yesterday. She never smiled, for there was nothing to make her smile.

But she gained one thing by this desolation: the thought of her dead
father came to her, as it had never come before; and she began to love
him with an intensity she had known nothing of till now. Her mother had
died at her birth, and she had been her father's treasure; but in the
last period of his illness she had seen less of him, and the blank left
by his death had, therefore, come upon her gradually. Before she knew
what it was, she had begun to forget. In the minds of children the
grass grows very quickly over their buried dead. But now she learned
what death meant, or rather what love had been; not, however, as an
added grief: it comforted her to remember how her father had loved her;
and she said her prayers the oftener, because they seemed to go
somewhere near the place where her father was. She did not think of her
father being where God was, but of God being where her father was.

The winter was drawing nearer too, and the days were now short and
cold. A watery time began, and for many days together the rain kept
falling without intermission. I almost think Annie would have died, but
for her dead father to think about. On one of those rainy days,
however, she began to find that it is in the nature of good things to
come in odd ways. It had rained the whole day, not tamely and
drizzingly, but in real earnest, dancing and rebounding from the pools,
and raising a mist by the very "crash of water-drops." Now and then the
school became silent, just to listen to the wide noise made by the busy
cataract of the heavens, each drop a messenger of good, a sweet
returning of earth's aspirations, in the form of Heaven's _Amen_! But
the boys thought only of the fun of dabbling in the torrents as they
went home; or the delights of net-fishing in the swollen and muddy
rivers, when the fish