"
"I'm not good! and I'm not beautiful!" cried Joan, and burst into
tears of humiliation and sore--heartedness. What a contrast was
their house and its hospitality, she thought, to those in which
Cosmo lived one heart and one soul with his father!
"But," she resumed the next moment, wiping away her tears, "you
must not think I have no right to do anything for you. My father
left all his personal property to me, and I know there was money in
his bureau, saved up for me--I KNOW it; and I know too that my
brother took it! I said never a word about it to him or any
one--never mentioned the subject before; but I can't have you
feeling as if you had been taking what I had no right to give!"
They had come to the dry fountain, with its great cracked basin, in
the centre of which stood the parched naiad, pouring an endless
nothing from her inverted vase. Forsaken and sad she looked. All
the world had changed save her, and left her a memorial of former
thoughts, vanished ways, and forgotten things: she, alas! could not
alter, must be still the same, the changeless centre of change. All
the winters would beat upon her, all the summers would burn her;
but never more would the glad water pour plashing from her dusty
urn! never more would the birds make showers with their beating
wings in her cool basin! The dead leaves would keep falling year
after year to their rest, but she could not fall, must, through the
slow ages, stand, until storm and sunshine had wasted her atom by
atom away.
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