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“Dear child, there is no writing to him.”

“Oh, dear! that’s the worst. Oh, that horrid, horrid sea! It’s like death–you don’t know where they are, and you can’t hear from them–and a four years’ voyage! Oh, dear! oh, dear!”

“Don’t, dear child, don’t; you distress me,” said Mrs. Pitkin.

“Yes, that’s just like me,” said Diana, wiping her eyes. “Here I am thinking only of myself, and you that have had your heart broken are trying to comfort me, and trying to comfort Cousin Silas. We have both of us scolded and flouted him away, and now you, who suffer the most of either of us, spend your breath to comfort us. It’s just like you. But, cousin, I’ll try to be good and comfort you. I’ll try to be a daughter to you. You need somebody to think of you, for you never think of yourself. Let’s go in his room,” she said, and taking the mother by the hand they crossed to the empty room. There was his writing-table, there his forsaken books, his papers, some of his clothes hanging in his closet. Mrs. Pitkin, opening a drawer, took out a locket hung upon a bit of blue ribbon, where there were two locks of hair, one of which Diana recognized as her own, and one of James’s. She hastily hung it about her neck and concealed it in her bosom, laying her hand hard upon it, as if she would still the beatings of her heart.

“It seems like a death,” she said. “Don’t you think the ocean is like death–wide, dark, stormy, unknown? We cannot speak to or hear from them that are on it.”

“But people can and do come back from the sea,” said the mother, soothingly. “I trust, in God’s own time, we shall see James back.”

“But what if we never should? Oh, cousin! I can’t help thinking of that. There was Michael Davis,–you know–the ship was never heard from.”

“Well,” said the mother, after a moment’s pause and a choking down of some rising emotion, and turning to a table on which lay a Bible, she opened and read: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.”

The THEE in this psalm was not to her a name, a shadow, a cipher, to designate the unknowable–it stood for the inseparable Heart-friend–the Father seeing in secret, on whose bosom all her tears of sorrow had been shed, the Comforter and Guide forever dwelling in her soul, and giving peace where the world gave only trouble.

Diana beheld her face as it had been the face of an angel. She kissed her, and turned away in silence.

CHAPTER VII.

THANKSGIVING AGAIN.

Seven years had passed and once more the Thanksgiving tide was in Mapleton. This year it had come cold and frosty. Chill driving autumn storms had stripped the painted glories from the trees, and remorseless frosts had chased the hardy ranks of the asters and golden-rods back and back till scarce a blossom could be found in the deepest and most sequestered spots. The great elm over the Pitkin farm-house had been stripped of its golden glory, and now rose against the yellow evening sky, with its infinite delicacies of net work and tracery, in their way quite as beautiful as the full pomp of summer foliage. The air without was keen and frosty, and the knotted twigs of the branches knocked against the roof and rattled and ticked against the upper window panes as the chill evening wind swept through them.

Seven long years had passed since James sailed. Years of watching, of waiting, of cheerful patience, at first, and at last of resigned sorrow. Once they heard from James, at the first port where the ship stopped. It was a letter dear to his mother’s heart, manly, resigned and Christian; expressing full purpose to work with God in whatever calling he should labor, and cheerful hopes of the future. Then came a long, long silence, and then tidings that the Eastern Star had been wrecked on a reef in the Indian ocean! The mother had given back her treasure into the same beloved hands whence she first received him. “I gave him to God, and God took him,” she said. “I shall have him again in God’s time.” This was how she settled the whole matter with herself. Diana had mourned with all the vehement intensity of her being, but out of the deep baptism of sorrow she had emerged with a new and nobler nature. The vain, trifling, laughing Undine had received a soul and was a true woman. She devoted herself to James’s mother with an utter self-sacrificing devotion, resolved as far as in her lay to be both son and daughter to her. She read, and studied, and fitted herself as a teacher in a neighboring academy, and persisted in claiming the right of a daughter to place all the amount of her earnings in the family purse.