downward, folded Sunny in its arms as if to bear her away.
Roger woke with his own vain attempt to grasp and detain the child. The setting sun streamed in at the window, and his mother stood at his side, brought by some inarticulate sound from Sunny's lips.
She sent the boy to call his father, and when they came in together, the child's wide blue eyes were open, full of supernatural calm; her parched lips parted with a faint smile; and the loose golden curls pushed off her forehead, where the blue veins crept, like vivid stains of violet, under the clear skin.
"Dear mother!" she said, raising her arms slowly, to be lifted on the pillow; but the low, hoarse voice had lost its music.
Then she turned to her father with that strange bright smile, and again to Roger, uttering faintly,—
"Stand away, Roger; Sunny wants the light."
They drew all the curtain opposite her bed away, and, as she stretched her hands eagerly toward the window, the last rays of sunshine glowed on her pale illuminated face, till it was even as an angel's, and Roger caught a sudden gleam of wings across the air; but a cold pain struck him as he gazed, for Sunny fell backward on her pillow. She had gone with the sunshine.
It seemed now for a time as if the phantasm that haunted Roger Pierce were banished at last. His moody reserve disappeared; he addressed himself with quiet, constant effort to console his mother,—to aid his father, to fill, so far as he could, the vacant place; and his heart longed with an incessant thirst for the bright Spirit that hovered in his dream over Sunny;—he seemed almost to have begun a natural and healthy life.
But year after year passed away, and the light of Sunny's influence faded with her fading memory. Green turf grew over her short grave, and the long slant shadow of its headstone no longer lay on a foot-worn track. Roger's pilgrimages to that spot were over; his heart had
ceased to remember. The Shadow had reassumed its power, and reigned. Still through its obscurity he kept one gleam of light, an admiration undiminished for those who seemed to have no such attendance; but daily the number of these grew less.
At length, after the studies of his youth were over, and he had returned to his old home for life, there came over the settled and brooding darkness of his soul a warm ray of dawn. In some way, as naturally as one meets a fresh wind full of vernal odor and life, yet never marks the moment of its first caress, so naturally, so unmarkedly, he renewed a childish acquaintance with Violet Chan- ning, a dweller in the same quiet valley with himself, though for long years the fine threads of circumstance had parted them.
Not a stone, and the frail green moss that clings to it, are more essentially different than were Roger Pierce and Violet Channing. Without a trace of the Shadow in herself, Violet disbelieved its existence in others. She had heard a rumor of Roger's phantom, but thought it some strange delusion, or want of perception, in those who told her,—being rather softened toward him with pity that he should be so little understood.
In the first days of their acquaintance, it seemed as if the light of the girl's face would have dispelled forever the darkness of her companion's Shadow, it was so mild and quiet a shining, not the mere outer lustre of beauty, but the deep in- forming expression of that Spirit which had companioned Sunny heavenward.
With Violet, soothed by the timid sweetness of her manner, aroused by her sudden flashes of mirth and vivid enthusiasm, Roger seemed to forget his hateful companion, or remembered it only to be consoled by her tender eyes that beamed with pity and affection.
Month after month this intimacy went on, brightening daily in Roger's mind the ideal picture of his new friend, but creating in her only a deeper sympathy and a more devout compassion for his
