"Currite ducentes, subteinina currite fusi!"
The governess was seized by a vague apprehension as she watched her pupil, and bending down, she said, fondly: "Felix, my darling, I have come back! Never again while I live will I leave you."
The almost bewildering joy that flashed into his countenance mutely but eloquently welcomed her, as kneeling beside the sofa she wound her arms around him, and drew his head to her shoulder.
"Edna, is Mr. Hammond dead?"
"No, he is almost well again, and needs me no more."
"I need you more than anybody else ever did. Oh, Edna! I thought sometimes you would stay at the South that you love so well, and I should see you no more; and then all the light seemed to die out of the world, and the flowers were not sweet, and the stars were not bright, and oh! I was glad I had not long to live."
"Hush! you must not talk so. How do you know that you may not live as long as Ahasuerus, the 'Everlasting Jew'? My dear little boy, in all this wide earth, you are the only one whom I have to love and cling to, and we will be happy together. Darling, your head aches to-day?"
She pressed her lips twice to his hot forehead.
"Yes; but the heartache was much the hardest to bear until you came. Mamma has been very good and kind, and staid at home and read to me; but I wanted you, Edna. I do not believe I have been wicked since you left; for I prayed all the while that God would bring you back to me. I have tried hard to be patient."
With her cheek nestled against his, Edna told him many things that had occurred during their separation, and noticed that his eyes brightened suddenly and strangely.
"Edna, I have a secret to tell you; something that even mamma is not to know just now. You must not laugh at me. While you were gone I wrote a little MS., and it is dedicated to you! and some day I hope it will be printed. Are you glad, Edna? My beautiful, pale Edna!"
"Felix, I am very glad you love me sufficiently to dedicate your little MS. to me; but, my dear boy, I must see it before I can say I am glad you wrote it."
"If you had been here, it would not have been written, because then I should merely have talked out all the ideas to you; but you were far away, and so I talked to my paper. After all, it was only a dream. One night I was feverish, and mamma read aloud those passages that you marked in that great book, Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea, that you admire and quote so often; and of which I remember you said once, in talking to Mr. Manning, that 'it rolled its warm, beautiful, sparkling waves of thought across the cold, gray sea of science, just like the Gulf Stream it treated of.' Two of the descriptions which mamma read were so splendid that they rang in my ears like the music of the Swiss Bell-Ringers. One was the account of the atmosphere, by Dr. Buist of Bombay, and the other was the description of the Indian Ocean, which was quoted from Schleiden's Lecture. My fever was high, and when at last I went to sleep, I had a queer dream about madrepores and medusae, and I wrote it down as well as I could, and called it 'Algae Adventures, in a Voyage Round the World.' Edna, I have stolen something from you, and as you will be sure to find it out when you read my little story, where there is a long, hard word missing in the MS., I will tell you about it now. Do you recollect talking to me one evening, when we were walking on the beach at The Willows, about some shell-clad animalcula, which you said were so very small that Professor Schultze, of Bonn, found no less than a million and a half of their minute shells in an ounce of pulverized quartz, from the shore of Mo la di Gaeta? Well, I put all you told me in my little MS.; but, for my life, I could not think of the name of the class to which they belong. Do you recollect it?"