My step-mother was then in the weeds of mourning, and of course excluded herself in a measure from gay society; but I marvelled that sorrow had not impaired the bloom of her cheek, or quenched the sparkle of her cold, bright eye.

Her heart was not buried in the grave of her children,--it belonged to the world, to which she panted to return.
"But my father mourned.

There was a shadow on his manly brow, which I had never seen before.

I was, now, his only child, the representative of his once beloved Rosalie, and the pure, fond love of his early years revived again in me.

I look back upon those two months, when I basked in the sunshine of parental tenderness for the first, the _only_ time, as a portion of my life most dear and holy.