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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Even so, beloved Eva! fair star of thy dwelling! Thou art passing away: but they that love thee dearest know it not. The colloquy between Tom and Eva was interrupted by a hasty call from Miss Ophelia. “Eva-Eva!- why, child, the dew is falling; you mustn’t be out there!” Eva and Tom hastened in. Miss Ophelia was old, and skilled in the tactics of nursing. She was from New England, and knew well the first guileful footsteps of that soft, insidious disease, which sweeps away so many of the fairest and loveliest, and, before one fibre of life seems broken, seals them irrevocably for death. She had noted the slight, dry cough, the daily brightening cheek; nor could the lustre of the eye, and the airy buoyancy born of fever, deceive her. She tried to communicate her fears to St. Clare; but he threw back her sugges- tions with a restless petulance, unlike his usual careless good-humor. “Don’t be croaking, cousin,- I hate it!” he would say; “don’t you see that the child is only growing. Children always lose strength when they grow fast.” “But she has that cough!” “O! nonsense of that cough!- it is not anything. She has taken a little cold, per- haps.” |
