She
loathed herself, her coldness, her want of love to him,--to all the
world. If she could only tell him she loved him, once more!--hiding her
face in his breast, wishing she could lie there as cold and still as he,
whispering, continually, "Father! Father!" Could he not hear? When they
took him away, she did not cry nor faint. When trouble stabbed Dode to
the quick, she was one of those people who do not ask for help, but go
alone, like a hurt deer, until the wound heals or kills. This was a loss
for life. Of course, this throbbing pain would grieve itself down; but
in all the years to come no one would take just the place her old father
had left vacant. Husband and child might be dearer, but she would never
be "Dody" to any one again. She shut the loss up in her own heart. She
never named him afterwards.
It was a cold winter's evening, that, after the funeral. The January
wind came up with a sharp, dreary sough into the defiles of the hills,
crusting over the snow-sweeps with a glaze of ice that glittered in the
pearly sunlight, clear up the rugged peaks. There, at the edge of them,
the snow fretted and arched and fell back in curling foam-waves with
hints of delicate rose-bloom in their white shining. The trees, that had
stood all winter bare and patient, lifting up their dumb arms in dreary
supplication, suddenly, to-day, clothed themselves, every trunk and limb
and twig, in flashing ice, that threw back into the gray air the royal
greeting of a thousand splendid dyes, violet, amber, and crimson,--to
show God they did not need to wait for summer days to praise Him.
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