conclusion. "He never did care. You must never speak of him to
anybody again."

Rachel slipped silently from her mother's knee and ran out to the
Springtime garden with a full heart. There she cried
passionately over her mother's last words. It seemed to her a
terrible thing that her father should not love her, and a cruel
thing that she must never talk of him.

Oddly enough, Rachel's sympathies were all with her father, in as
far as she could understand the old quarrel. She did not dream
of disobeying her mother and she did not disobey her. Never
again did the child speak of her father; but Isabella had not
forbidden her to think of him, and thenceforth Rachel thought of
him constantly--so constantly that, in some strange way, he
seemed to become an unguessed-of part of her inner life--the
unseen, ever-present companion in all her experiences.

She was an imaginative child, and in fancy she made the
acquaintance of her father. She had never seen him, but he was
more real to her than most of the people she had seen. He played
and talked with her as her mother never did; he walked with her
in the orchard and field and garden; he sat by her pillow in the
twilight; to him she whispered secrets she told to none other.

Once her mother asked her impatiently why she talked so much to
herself.

"I am not talking to myself. I am talking to a very dear friend
of mine," Rachel answered gravely.