A voice she had not heard tenderly exclaimed:
"I love him as I never loved A male!"
"It is my husband's spirit," the widow breathed. "I cannot marry."
She swooned upon her floor, before the dying fire.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
VIRGIE'S FLIGHT.
Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on
snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though
the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered,
willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great
speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to
heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.
Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind
from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now
covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had
called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of
old Snow Hill in London.
Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of
English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian,
which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new
world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor
might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the
Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling
tide of blood; and Worcester was the name of the county, as the court
and jail might tell.
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