"I'm not in tne humour for riding, aunt. Nothing will do me good but
a walk. I shall put some luncheon in my bag."
She went quietly out by the front door, walked slowly, softly,
statelily along the street and out of the town, and entered the park
by the lodge-gate. She saw Rachel at her work in the kitchen as she
passed, and heard her singing in a low and weak but very sweet
voice, which went to her heart like a sting, making the tall,
handsome, rich lady envy the poor distorted atom who, through all
the fogs of her winter, had yet something in her that sought such
utterance. But, indeed, if all her misery had been swept away like a
dream, Helen might yet have envied the dwarf ten times more than she
did now, had she but known how they stood compared with each other.
For the being of Helen to that of Rachel was as a single, untwined
primary cell to a finished brain; as the peeping of a chicken to the
song of a lark--I had almost said, to a sonata of Beethoven.
"Good day, Rachel," she said, calling as she passed, in a kindly,
even then rather condescending voice, through the open door, where a
pail of water, just set down, stood rocking the sun on its heaving
surface, and flashing it out again into the ocean of the light.
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