"
Ours was a happy household; no cloud rested upon it, save for a few
brief days of illness or discomfort, until the great blow fell. In her
seventeenth year and on the eve of her marriage with Norman Stansbury
(again our neighbor, at intervals, when he came to visit his relatives,
a man of noble qualities and singularly devoted to my sister), Mabel
died suddenly of some secret disease of the heart which had simulated
radiant health and bloom.
I had sometimes observed with anxiety a slight shortness of breath, a
gasping after unusual exercise, and called the attention of physicians
to this state of things in my sister, who regarded it merely as a
nervous symptom, and this was all to indicate that the fell destroyer
was silently at work. She had just laid a bunch of white roses on her
toilet, and crossed the chamber for water to place them in, when she
called my name in a strange, excited way, that brought me speedily to
her side from the adjoining room. She was lying white and speechless on
her bed, beside which the crystal goblet lay in fragments.
The waters of her own existence had flowed forthwith those prepared for
her flowers, and before assistance could be summoned she expired
peacefully in my arms, without a struggle. She had inherited her
mother's malady.
The anguish, and disappointment of the lover, and my own despair, maybe
better imagined than portrayed.
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