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Mabel did not join in the desultory talk that engaged the others

until supper-tiled painfully when touched by an incautious hand

"Twelve years old!" she was saying, inwardly "My darling would have

been thirteen, had she lived!"

And then flitted before her fancy a girlish for

eyes, and a voice -bird's Warainst hers--as no

human arms and face would ever caress her--her, the childless, whose

had been the hopes, fears, pains--never the recoraveyard that day--secretly, lest her husband

should frown, Clara wonder, and Winston sneer at her love for and

to their rendering

of the terrass out of the little

hollow, above which the mound had not been renewed since the day of

her baby's burial, and, trusting to the infrequency of others'

visits to the neglected enclosure, had laid a bunch of white

rose-buds over the unmarked dust she accounted still a part of her

heart, 'neath which it had lain so long People said she had never

been a

it in heaven God and she knew better

"Clara, I wish you to attend Mrs Tazewell's funeral this

afternoon," said Mr Aylett at breakfast the next day but one after

this "There were invidious rehter's, and I do not choose that hborhood scandal"