The Argosy — page 87: what you’re looking at

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

72 Poor Aunt Deb! occur to break the even tenour of our way. But ah! my friend, most cruelly was my belief shaken. A day came in which the shining sun had no more warmth for me—the sweet sights and sounds of . life fell on deafened ears ! | “Tt was my seventeenth birthday, and we three had planned a drive of many miles to Ullswater Lake, and then a day of boating and sketching. I, in my excitement at such an unusual excursion, had risen early, prepared the breakfast and planned what preparations old Elizabeth should make for our evening meal, when I thought how slow my father was in coming down. I ran upstairs, singing as I went, and entering his room, with a jest upon his laziness, I found him—how? Dead! Still and cold just as he had laid himself down to rest. I thought he had fainted. ‘‘Death had never come near to me, and I knew not the strange visitor. ‘True, my girl-mother’s death had often been alluded to by him, but in such a simple, tender manner that I only thought of her as just removed one step from us—one step higher on the Jacob’s Ladder that reaches from earth to Heaven: God’s good angels nearest to Him, and our lost friends just beyond the clouds. ‘“T cannot now tell you all his departure meant for me. Our home was broken up, and what little fund was realised was to be the means of taking me to an aunt who lived all alone in wilder parts of Shropshire. “Then John Verney, who, in the time of emergency, had made all arrangements for me, and whose sympathy and care was so doubly precious in my loneliness, asked me if I was willing to be his wife and continue to live in the north country, which my father’s grave made dearer to me than any spot on earth. ‘T look back now with wider opened eyes, and wonder how even I, in my utter ignorance of the world’s ways, could have agreed so quickly ; have consented in two months’ time to vow in our little church to be the wife of a man I really knew so little of. ‘For another twelvemonth all went well, and I was as happy as I could expect to be considering the ever present sense of my father’s loss, when a horrible awakening came to me. I found that | was no wife at all. Another woman, years ago, had married him, and to escape her temper and extravagance, he had fled and left her. Long had she sought him. And now in this quiet spot, under an assumed name, where he had lived first as our neighbour, and then as my husband, she found him once again. “Oh! that scene in all its bitterness, how it comes to me again ! I listened to their words till my heart stood still to hear, and I fled to my room. ‘““T remember a dim, instinctive feeling, that now my father’s sister was all I had to trust to. Half unconsciously ; driven on by some mad impulse, that came I know not how; I gathered together a few of my possessions, emptied my childish money-box of the little hoard Gomichbooksncom