THE PLACE OF REST.

Constance need not have been anxious—Hudson was from home. Seized with a sudden panic of remorse, he had wandered in the streets, and when tired out with walking, stopped in a remote street, not altogether unlike his own neighborhood, and entered a little two-story house, with which he seemed to be familiar, for he mounted the frail stairs at once, and knocked at the door of an upper room as if quite at home there.

A cry of surprise or delight reached him through the ill-fitting door. Directly it was opened, and a young girl stood on the threshold holding some needle-work in one hand, while she extended the other with a gesture of welcome, which might have warmed the heart of any man.

"Are you glad to see me, Constance?" he said, in a voice so sweet and gentle, that you would not have recognized him as the same man who had just parted from Church.

"When did you come here that I was not glad?" answered the girl, with a slow, sweet smile, full of tenderness. "Dear, dear uncle, what happiness can I know like that of having you with me?"

Hudson stooped down and kissed her with a tenderness his own child had never experienced. Then she made haste to welcome him. Her Boston rocking-chair, with a cushion in it made from pieces of gay silk, was drawn toward him; a single rose, that stood in an old-fashioned wine-glass on the table, was drawn into sight; two or three books were re-arranged, and then the girl sat down with a deep drawn sigh, so full of delight, that Hudson recognised it with another sigh, so deep and painful, that hers ended in a faint sob.

"What is it that troubles you, uncle?" she said, moving a low stool close to his feet, and sitting down upon it as a little child might have done. "If it is anything I have done——"

"My poor child! Anything you have done? You who give me nothing but happiness, however badly I may deserve it. No, no! It is because I have made my own sorrows that they are so hard to endure."

"If I could only bear them for you. Indeed, indeed, I would, dear uncle!"

"I know it—I know it, poor child; but as we sow so shall we reap; and I have made a thorny harvest for myself. There, there, turn your eyes away, nothing very terrible has happened. Now tell me, child, how you get along?"

"Oh, nicely! Since you paid up the rent, and got in my stock of coal, there has been no room for trouble."

"But are you not lonesome, Constance?"

"Not much—one hasn't time for that. There is lots of company in hard work."

"I think you are cheating now," said Hudson, observing that a mist of tears stole over her eyes in spite of the smile she wore. "This must be a lonely life."

"Not if you could be here a little oftener."

"It may chance—it may happen that I can be with you altogether."

The girl sprung up with a burst of joy, and flung her arms about his neck.

"Oh, uncle."

"Will it make you happy, child?"

"Happy? Ah! so happy!"

"Well, child, God may so arrange it for us."

"I will pray for it every night of my life, and so must you, dear uncle."

"I—I pray? Sometimes in outer darkness it seems so impossible that God should listen to me; but you—child—the prayers of children, you know, are most powerful."

"How good you are!"

"Am I? Well, you must always be good. It is my great comfort that no evil has reached you."

"How could it? She took such sweet care of me always; and now that I am left alone—that is, almost alone—she seems to be more with me than ever."

Hudson shook his head, and bending his eyes sadly upon her, murmured something about wishing that he could think so; and the girl saw that his eyes filled with a gloomy moisture.

"You might think so, if you could understand how safe and protected I feel," she said, pressing his hand to her cheek and lips. "Sometimes I almost hear her voice again as she prayed for you."

Hudson started and shrunk together in his chair, as if some one had struck him a sudden blow.

"You did not tell me of this," he said.

"Didn't I? Well, I suppose it was because you had more trouble than you could bear, when you came here and found the room so empty. But I do not think you ever knew how much she loved you."

Hudson covered his face with his hands. His shoulders began to heave; and then he fell into a shaking fit, which frightened the girl till she entreated him to be still, and made a tender effort to soothe him.

"Don't, don't! It would make her feel so badly if she knew it. For her sake, try and bear up. I was so wrong to say a word about it."

"No," answered the man, conquering himself and speaking with infinite tenderness. "I am glad to know; if only—only——she had lived till I came."

"I understand, I understand, and never will again. There, you are almost smiling. Shall I get you a nice cup of tea, and anything you like best? Does that mean yes? Oh! how pleasant it is!"

She started up and would have filled the little tin tea-kettle, but Hudson stopped her, declaring that he could not drink a mouthful of anything, and must go in a few minutes, he had so many things to attend to.

"Are you going down yonder, uncle?" said the girl, taking her little bonnet from a nail on which it hung. "Of course you will want me, so many people are sick just now."

"No, dear, you must not run such risks again; contagious diseases are creeping into the families you have been to see."

"But some one must take care of them, uncle?"

"Yes, but it must not be my sister's child. Sit down at my feet again, or rather you may get a cup of tea ready. It will make me stronger for my work."

The girl untied her bonnet, and disappeared with a little tea-kettle in her hand, leaving Hudson for a time alone.

How sad and humble his face looked as he drew his chair up to the work-stand on which his niece had laid the garment she was toiling over when his step disturbed her. A large old bible lay on the stand. He opened it reverently at the leaves which had been filled in with a family record. There was the marriage of his father, John Hudson to Constance Barret, in a hand writing clear and firm as copperplate printing, but old fashioned and faded in the ink, for his father had written it many years before that gloomy evening. Then came the birth of two children, a son and a daughter, himself and a lovely woman whose death he mourned even yet, with the tender bitterness of self reproachful love.

Another record. The marriage of this sister, and the birth of a child, named like herself, Constance, thus making three generations of the name, which in every case had brought wonderful beauty and womanly goodness with it.

Hudson closed the book with a sigh. There was no register of his marriage there, no mention of his child, and he was glad of it. The woman he had married, possessed no right to mingle even her name with the pure and gentle beings who had left an honorable record there. She was dead now, but all the evil that had fallen upon his life, had been trailed through it by her misdeeds and her fatal influence over himself.

A daughter had been born to him on the very year that gave the girl who had just left him to his sister. He remembered the mingled joy and bitterness of that hour, the almost holy reverence with which he had given his mother's name to the child, as if that could purify the evil nature which she must inherit from a parent at once beautiful, crafty, and wicked at heart.

A mournful smile crept over the lips of that poor man when he thought of the strange sympathy that had induced himself and his sister to give their children the name of their own mother almost simultaneously, each ignorant that the other had become a parent at all.

How differently those children had grown up in the world, strangers to each other, and so utterly unlike in character. But Hudson would have shrunk painfully from bringing them together, had not the solemn request made by his sister, in writing before she died, prohibited all intimacy between her child and the daughter of a woman who had broken up the life of her only brother.

It was a hard condition to make with him, a man whose child was very dear to him, but Hudson held this dying wish of his sister as a sacred command. Years after, when the father of his niece died insolvent, and she was cast upon the world, this man, harassed and broken down as he was, took charge of her and spared enough out of his own slender means to keep her in tolerable comfort.

This one good act gave a sort of haven of rest to the unhappy man, for his own child held little sympathy with him as we have seen,—here nature herself seemed to join with fate in persecuting him. From the Hudsons she inherited all her great personal beauty, but the selfish, ambitious, reckless soul was that of the woman whose death had been to father and child a mercy and a relief.

Never, perhaps, had two persons more closely resembled each other than these cousins, who had never met. The same rare beauty of form and color, the same graceful movement, the voice sweet and caressing in its general tones, belonged to them alike. The expression, however, was utterly different. Through one face looked the soul of a high-toned, truthful, and highly poetic woman, full of tenderness, and courageous goodness. There is little need of describing the other. Character gives expression; hers changed, sparkled, grew sullen and stormed, as events brought forth its reckless qualities.

"Ah, I see what makes you so sad, uncle; I will not have the bible out if you are always searching that page. What, tears in your eyes. I thought you were always to be happy here. See, I have brought out my mother's china cup, which belonged to your mother once, and _such_ tea. There there! isn't this snug?"

Constance Ellery cleared her workstand, covered it with a snow white napkin, and set the cup of delicate old-fashioned china before her uncle, while she filled a less costly one for herself.

"Now," she said, "you must forget everything else, and tell me about these poor people. O, uncle, when I think of the good you are doing among them, my own life seems so worthless. It is only when you take me with you, that I feel of any use in the world."

"Then you shall go with me to-night, child. Heaven forbid that I should deprive my sister's child of the happiness of helping her fellow-creatures."

"That is like my own dear uncle," said the girl, smiling upon her visitor as he drained the china cup she had given him. "I think our patients like it best when we come together."

"It would be strange if they did not," said Hudson, looking tenderly on the lovely face which was now all aglow with animation. "The very sight of your face, dear, seems to light up their miserable dens, and the sound of your voice is as sweet as a prayer to them."

"Then I will not forget to thank God for my face and the voice that gives them comfort. Now I am ready, uncle."

Constance Hudson had never felt half the pleasure in departing for her dancing classes, that this other Constance experienced while preparing to go forth on an errand of mercy into such haunts of poverty as an ordinary woman would have shrunk from.

With a cheap shawl covering her dress, and a thick veil thrown over her mite of a bonnet, the girl stood ready for one of the grandest errands that a brave, kind heart can undertake,—that of carrying counsel to the vicious, and help to the poor.