It was
remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her
features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was
burning away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs
of danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might
turn the balance which held life and death poised against each other.
He surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every
opportunity of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death
to the scale of life, as she will often do, if not rudely disturbed or
interfered with.
Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming
to her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village.
Some of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent
her, and her table was covered with fruits--which tempted her in vain.
Several of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own
handiwork, and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint
offering. Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing
to have his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some
boughs full of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging
to the stricken trees.
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