'Unwatch'd the garden bough shall sway,

The tender blossom flutter down,

Unloved that beech will gather brown,

The maple burn itself away; Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,

Ray round with flames her disk of seed,

And many a rose-carnation feed

With summer spice the humming air;

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow,

And year by year the landscape grow

Familiar to the stranger's child; As year by year the labourer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;

And year by year our memory fades

From all the circle of the hills.'

TENNYSON.

The last day came; the house was full of packing-cases, which

were being carted off at the front door, to the nearest railway

station. Even the pretty lawn at the side of the house was made

unsightly and untidy by the straw that had been wafted upon it

through the open door and windows. The rooms had a strange

echoing sound in them,--and the light came harshly and strongly

in through the uncurtained windows,--seeming already unfamiliar

and strange.

Mrs. Hale's dressing-room was left untouched to the

last; and there she and Dixon were packing up clothes, and

interrupting each other every now and then to exclaim at, and

turn over with fond regard, some forgotten treasure, in the shape

of some relic of the children while they were yet little. They

did not make much progress with their work. Down-stairs, Margaret

stood calm and collected, ready to counsel or advise the men who

had been called in to help the cook and Charlotte. These two

last, crying between whiles, wondered how the young lady could

keep up so this last day, and settled it between them that she

was not likely to care much for Helstone, having been so long in

London.

There she stood, very pale and quiet, with her large

grave eyes observing everything,--up to every present

circumstance, however small. They could not understand how her

heart was aching all the time, with a heavy pressure that no

sighs could lift off or relieve, and how constant exertion for

her perceptive faculties was the only way to keep herself from

crying out with pain. Moreover, if she gave way, who was to act?

Her father was examining papers, books, registers, what not, in

the vestry with the clerk; and when he came in, there were his

own books to pack up, which no one but himself could do to his

satisfaction.

Besides, was Margaret one to give way before

strange men, or even household friends like the cook and

Charlotte! Not she. But at last the four packers went into the

kitchen to their tea; and Margaret moved stiffly and slowly away

from the place in the hall where she had been standing so long,

out through the bare echoing drawing-room, into the twilight of

an early November evening. There was a filmy veil of soft dull

mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac

hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was

singing,--perhaps, Margaret thought, the very robin that her

father had so often talked of as his winter pet, and for which he

had made, with his own hands, a kind of robin-house by his

study-window. The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first

touch of frost would lay them all low on the ground. Already one

or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low

slanting sun-rays.




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