The Widowed Bride — page 38: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE WIDOWED BRIDE. — 29 and put her hand on the forehead she could but just dis- cern.in the faint glimmer of the casement. She drew it back with a sudden movement of dismay. ‘‘How cold he is! And why doesn’t he speak to me? Rena, Rena, I am afraid!” broke tremulously from her lips. Rena felt his head, and uttered a wild, piteous wail! “Oh, Allie, he is dead! Grandpapa is dead! He never will speak to you any more!” With a child’s untaught, instinctive terror of death, both of the little girls shrank away from the couch upon which rested the mortal remains of him who had at last put on immortality. In the same instant the rising wind fluttered — the ivy trails at the casement, and an owl shrieked down the ruinous chimney with a mournful cry like that of the banshee. | ‘Tt is a ghost!” faltered Allie. ‘‘Rena, Re—na, let us run!” Of ghostly visitants, Rena was not afraid, but she had a mortal horror of the reappearance of the human shadow she called the ‘‘W hite Woman,” and flight appeared to be the only surety of avoiding it. She caught Alice’s hand in hers, and the two lonely vision-haunted little creatures fled out into the starry darkness, crouching under hedges, pausing with palpitating hearts at every flutter of a leaf, or creaking of a wind-stirred bough. Rena fully believed that she had taken the road leading to St. Hilda’s Church, and the little village they had seen the day before; but in her agitation, combined with the darkness and her own uncertain ideas of the localities, she had kept on past the turning, and was several miles on a road leading away to the north-west; while little Alice, mutely obedient to her sister’s guiding hand, and _ half asleep as she walked, or rather stumbled along, neither re- -monstrated or complained. The one all-absorbing idea, which had taken possession of Rena’s child-mind, was to escape away as far as possible from the dismal woods and darkness, and with blistered feet, torn garments, and delicate skin bleeding in more than one spot from the cruel spikes of wayside thorns and briers, the children plodded on, scarcely knowing that every footstep took them farther from the last clew which connected their past life and the future. ‘‘Rena,”’ pleaded poor little Alice at last, ‘‘please let me (elo) mn Gomicbooks