The Children's Pilgrimage

each other, and married. Maurice D'Albert, the father, was a man of a respectable class and for that class of rather remarkable culture. He owned a small vineyard

man to ask her where she came from, or what she did. Maurice D'Albert loved her at once. He married her when she was little more than a child; and for

nger, suddenly died. This death completely broke down the poor man. He had loved Rosalie so well that when she left him the sun seemed absolutely withdrawn from his life. He lived for many more years, but he never really held up his head again. Rosalie was gone! Even his children now could scarcely make him care for life. He began to hate the plac

and, in a poor and obscure corner of the great world of London, established himself with his babies. Poor man! the cold and damp English climate proved anything but the climate of his dreams. He caught one cold, then another, and after two or three years entered a period of confirmed ill-health, which was really to end in rapid consumption. His children, however, throve and grew strong. They both inherited their young mother's vigorous life. The English c

as teacher, of Spanish, and afterward he further added to his little income by giving lessons on the guitar. The money t

wife, he did not add to his happiness. The woman who came into the house came with a sore and broken heart. She brought no love for either father or children. All the love in her nature was centered on her own lost child. She came and gave no love, and received none, except from Cecile. Cecile loved everybody. There was that in the

. He died after a brief fresh cold, rather sudden

in the sunny southern country, of her mother, of little Maurice. He said that perhaps some day Cecile could go back and take Maurice with her to see with her own eyes the sunny vineyards of the south, and he told her what the child had never learned before, that she had a grandmother living in

s good to her little stepchildren. She religiously spent all their father's small income on them, and when she died, she had so arrang

would continue to be paid for the next four years, and the next half-year's al

rt was only stirred on the surface by this death. The little girl, too, was so oppressed, so overpowered by the care of the precious purse of money, she lived even already in such hourly dread of Aunt Lydia finding it, that she had no room in her mind for other sensations; there was no place in the lodgings in which they lived to hide the purse of bank notes and gold. Aunt Lydia seemed to be a woman who had eyes in the back of her h

l. "What is wrong, my little one?" he added, draw

her did say as I was a very dependable little girl. I think

nt away relieved about the funny, old-fashioned little foreign girl

quench the children's mirth when they got away into the fields, or scrambled over stiles into the woods. Beautiful Kent was then rich in its autumn tints. The children and dog lived out from morning to night. Provided they did not trouble her, Lydia Purcell was quite indifferent as to how

ain-rather she was a child at last. Oh! the joy of gathering real, real flowers with her own little brown hands. Oh! the delight of sitting under the hedges and listening to the birds singing. Maurice took it as a m

Cecile was only

k of the attic, were she had and Maurice and Toby slept, was a little chamber, so narrow-running

lding a candle in her hand, in the dead of nig

reme corner of this tiny attic in the roof an old broken wash-hand-stand lying on its back. In the wash-hand-stand was a drawer, and inside the drawer again a tidy little tin box. Cecile seized the box, sat down on

g down now, the roof was so near her head. Here she found what she had little expected to see-a cupboard cunningly contrived in the wall. She pushed it open. It was full

back into the cupboard, covered it with

earted child. For the present her se