The Triumph over Midian

“Home, once more at home!” how joyful sounded the exclamation from the lips of Edith Lestrange, and how brightly sparkled her eyes as she uttered it, as, with a step light as a fawn’s, she revisited each spot which five years’ absence had only made more dear. With joyous impatience she ascended the broad oaken staircase of Castle Lestrange, to flit like a fairy from room to room, lingering longest in the old nursery, where she had known childhood’s pleasures, with not a few of its sorrows—and the playroom, in which her toys were still stored. There was the doll that had been to her as a companion, to which the lonely little heiress had whispered many a trouble; the pretty picture-books, the miniature tea-things of delicate china, that had been such sources of amusement. It was a pleasure to Edith, from recollections of “auld lang syne,” to touch and handle these childish treasures, though at the age of eleven she deemed herself no longer a child.

Then to the newly-returned traveller how great were the delights of the garden and the park,—the one bright with the flowers of spring, the other donning its light green robe, while in the sheltered mossy dells fragrance of violets filled the air. Edith almost wondered that the light-footed deer should bound away on her approach: her heart felt so full of joy and kindness, that it seemed strange that any living creature should fear her. The heiress of Lestrange took pleasure in visiting the cottage of her father’s steward, where the familiar faces of Holdich and his wife were as the faces of old friends, bright with hearty welcome. Her canary, cared for by Mrs. Holdich during her absence, was tamer than ever, and its quivering notes of delight seemed to its youthful mistress an echo of the music of happiness which sounded within her own soul.

For Edith did not return to the castle of her ancestors as she had left it five years before—a feeble, fragile invalid. She no longer painfully dragged her weary limbs along, with languor oppressing her spirits; springing and elastic was the step which now bounded over the mossy turf. The cheeks that had been almost as colourless as the snowdrop, had now a faint dawn of colour upon them, like that on the opening buds of the apple-blossom. Edith was still a delicate plant, like an exotic reared in a hot-house, but an exotic skilfully tended, expanding its petals in healthful life.

“Oh, how true it is that there is no place like home!” exclaimed Edith, as she sauntered up the broad avenue, with sunshine on her path, and the blue cloud-flecked sky smiling above her.

The observation was addressed to her cousin, Isa Gritton, who was spending a day at the Castle, a short time after the return of Sir Digby Lestrange and his daughter. Isa was a young lady whose age might be about two or three and twenty, and who might therefore have scarcely been deemed a suitable companion for one so youthful as Edith, had not the little heiress possessed a mind so early matured by the discipline of trial that she was scarcely regarded as a child by those who intimately knew her. Isa Gritton was a tall and graceful girl, with auburn hair, and eyes like those of the gazelle—large, soft, and expressive: mirroring each passing emotion, whether it were that of mirth and gladness, or, as was now the case, a shadow of painful thought.