On the first of every
month, which old Oliver knew by the magazines coming in, he marked how
much his little love had grown by placing her against the side-post of
the door, and making a thick pencil line where her curly head reached to.
He looked at this record often, smiling at the rate his little woman was
growing taller; but it was really no wonder that his dim eyes, loving as
they were, never saw how the rosy colour was dying away out of her
cheeks, as gradually as the red glow fades away in the west after the sun
has set, nor how the light grew fainter and fainter in her blue eyes,
until they looked at him very heavily from under her drooping eyelids.
The house was too dark for any sight to see very clearly; the full,
strong, healthy light of the sun, could not find its way into it, and day
after day Dolly became more like one of those plants growing in shady
places, which live and shoot up, but only put out pale and sickly leaves,
and feeble buds. One by one, and by little and little, with degrees as
small as her own tiny footsteps, she lost all her merry ways, dropping
them, here one and there another, upon the path she was silently
treading; as little children let fall the flowers they have gathered in
the meadows, along their road homewards.
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