When I spoke of him angrily
(feeling as I did that he had distressed and tortured her, when she
ought to have had all the encouragement and comfort from him that man
could give), she refused to hear me: she made the kindest allowances
and the sweetest excuses for him, and laid all the blame of the dreadful
state in which I had found her entirely on herself. Was I wrong in
telling you that she had a noble nature? And won't you alter your
opinion when you read these lines?
"We had no friends to come and bid us good-by; and our few acquaintances
were too far from us--perhaps too indifferent about us--to call. We
employed the little leisure left in going over the house together for
the last time. We took leave of our old schoolroom, our bedrooms, the
room where our mother died, the little study where our father used to
settle his accounts and write his letters--feeling toward them, in our
forlorn condition, as other girls might have felt at parting with old
friends. From the house, in a gleam of fine weather, we went into the
garden, and gathered our last nosegay; with the purpose of drying the
flowers when they begin to wither, and keeping them in remembrance of
the happy days that are gone.
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