Try not to grieve over what you have heard about us this morning.

Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose?
What loss is there for us after the loss of our father and mother?
Oh, Miss Garth, _there_ is the only bitterness! What did we remember of them when we laid them in the grave yesterday?
Nothing but the love they gave us--the love we must never hope for again.

What else can we remember to-day?
What change can the world, and the world's cruel laws make in _our_ memory of the kindest father, the kindest mother, that children ever had!" She stopped: struggled with her rising grief; and quietly, resolutely, kept it down.

"Will you wait here," she said, "while I go and bring Magdalen back?
Magdalen was always your favorite: I want her to be your favorite still." She laid the music-book gently on Miss Garth's lap--and left the room.
"Magdalen was always your favorite." Tenderly as they had been spoken, those words fell reproachfully on Miss Garth's ear.

For the first time in the long companionship of her pupils and herself a doubt whether she, and all those about her, had not been fatally mistaken in their relative estimate of the sisters, now forced itself on her mind.
She had studied the natures of her two pupils in the daily intimacy of twelve years.