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last hope, his beloved daughter, who had just attained womanhood; and he
gazed on her with anxious eyes, while she tried to rally her fainting
spirit to comfort him. Here a servant, faithful to the last, though dying,
waited on one, who, though still erect with health, gazed with gasping fear
on the variety of woe around.
Adrian stood leaning against a tree; he held a book in his hand, but his
eye wandered from the pages, and sought mine; they mingled a sympathetic
glance; his looks confessed that his thoughts had quitted the inanimate
print, for pages more pregnant with meaning, more absorbing, spread out
before him. By the margin of the stream, apart from all, in a tranquil
nook, where the purling brook kissed the green sward gently, Clara and
Evelyn were at play, sometimes beating the water with large boughs,
sometimes watching the summer-flies that sported upon it. Evelyn now chased
a butterfly--now gathered a flower for his cousin; and his laughing
cherub-face and clear brow told of the light heart that beat in his bosom.
Clara, though she endeavoured to give herself up to his amusement, often
forgot him, as she turned to observe Adrian and me. She was now fourteen,
and retained her childish appearance, though in height a woman; she acted
the part of the tenderest mother to my little orphan boy; to see her
playing with him, or attending silently and submissively on our wants, you
thought only of her admirable docility and patience; but, in her soft eyes,
and the veined curtains that veiled them, in the clearness of her marmoreal
brow, and the tender expression of her lips, there was an intelligence and
beauty that at once excited admiration and love.
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