



Produced by Al Haines.


                                  Dawn
                             of the Morning


                                   BY
                         GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL


                               AUTHOR OF
                  MARCIA SCHUYLER, PHOEBE DEANE, ETC.



                                NEW YORK
                            GROSSET & DUNLAP
                               PUBLISHERS

                  Made in the United States of America




                            COPYRIGHT, 1911
                      BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY




                          Wings of the Morning


    "The morning hangs its signal
      Upon the mountain's crest,
    While all the sleeping valleys
      In silent darkness rest;
    From peak to peak it flashes,
      It laughs along the sky
    That the crowning day is coming, by and by!
    We can see the rose of morning,
      A glory in the sky,
    And that splendor on the hill-tops
      O'er all the land shall lie.
    Above the generations
      The lonely prophets rise,--
    The Truth flings dawn and day-star
      Within their glowing eyes;
    From heart to heart it brightens,
      It draweth ever nigh,
    Till it crowneth all men thinking, by and by!
    The soul hath lifted moments
      Above the drift of days,
    When life's great meaning breaketh
      In sunrise on our ways;
    From hour to hour it haunts us,
      The vision draweth nigh,
    Till it crowneth living, _dying_, by and by!
    And in the sunrise standing,
      Our kindling hearts confess
    That 'no good thing is failure.
      No evil thing success!'
    From age to age it groweth,
      That radiant faith so high,
    And its crowning day is coming by and by!"

    WILLIAM C. GANNETT




                          Dawn of the Morning



                               CHAPTER I


In the year 1824, in a pleasant town located between Schenectady and
Albany, stood the handsome colonial residence of Hamilton Van
Rensselaer.  Solemn hedges shut in the family pride and hid the family
sorrow, and about the borders of its spacious gardens, where even the
roses seemed subdued, there played a child.  The stately house oppressed
her, and she loved the sombre garden best.

Her only friend in the old house seemed a tall clock that stood on the
stairs and told out the hours in the hopeless tone that was expected of
a clock in such a house, though it often took time to wink pleasantly at
the child as she passed by, and talk off a few seconds and minutes in a
brighter tone.

But the great clock on the staircase ticked awesomely one morning as the
little girl went slowly down to her father's study in response to his
bidding.

She did not want to go.  She delayed her steps as much as possible, and
looked up at the kindly old clock for sympathy; but even the round-eyed
sun and the friendly moon that went around on the clock face every day
as regularly as the real sun and moon, and usually appeared to be bowing
and smiling at her, wore solemn expressions, and seemed almost pale
behind their highly painted countenances.

The little girl shuddered as she gave one last look over her shoulder at
them and passed into the dim recesses of the back hall, where the light
came only in weird, half-circular slants from the mullioned window over
the front door.  It was dreadful indeed when the jolly sun and moon
looked grave.

She paused before the heavy door of the study and held her breath,
dreading the ordeal that was to come.  Then, gathering courage, she
knocked timidly, and heard her father's instant, cold "Come."

With trembling fingers she turned the knob and went in.

There were heavy damask curtains at the windows, reaching to the floor,
caught back with thick silk cords and tassels.  They were a deep, sullen
red, and filled the room with oppressive shadows in no wise relieved by
the heavy mahogany furniture upholstered in the same red damask.

Her father sat by his ponderous desk, always littered with papers which
she must not touch.

His sternly handsome face was forbidding.  The very beauty of it was
hateful to her.  The look on it reminded her of that terrible day, now
nearly three years ago, when he had returned from a journey of several
months abroad in connection with some brilliant literary enterprise, and
had swept her lovely mother out of his life and home, the innocent
victim of long-entertained jealousy and most unfounded suspicion.

The little girl had been too young to understand what it was all about.
When she cried for her she was forbidden even to think of her, and was
told that her mother was unworthy of that name.

The child had declared with angry tears and stampings of her small foot,
that it was not true, that her mother was good and dear and beautiful;
but they had paid no heed to her.  The father had sternly commanded
silence and sent her away; and the mother had not returned.

So she had sobbed her heart out in the silence of her own room, where
every object reminded her of the lost mother's touch and voice and
presence, and had gone about the house in a sullen silence unnatural to
childhood, thereby making herself more enemies than friends.

Of her father she was afraid.  She shrank into terrified silence
whenever he approached, scarcely answering his questions, and growing
farther away from him every day, until he instinctively knew that she
hated him for her mother's sake.

When a year had passed he procured a divorce without protest from the
innocent but crushed wife, this by aid of a law that often places "Truth
forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne."  Not long after,
he brought to his home as his wife a capable, arrogant, self-opinionated
woman, who set herself to rule him and his household as it should be
ruled.

The little girl was called to audience in the gloomy study where sat the
new wife, her eyes filled with hostility toward the other woman's child,
and was told that she must call the lady "Mother."

Then the black eyes that held in their dreamy depths some of the
gunpowder flash of her father's steely ones took fire; the little face
darkened with indignant fury; the small foot came down with fierce
determination on the thick carpet, and the child declared:

"I will _never_ call her mother!  She is _not_ my mother! She is a bad
woman, and she has no right here.  She cannot be your wife.  It is
wicked for a man to have two wives.  I know, for I heard Mary Ann and
Betsey say so this morning in the kitchen.  My mother is alive yet. She
is at Grandfather's.  I heard Betsey say that too.  You are a wicked,
cruel man, and I hate you.  I will not have you for a father any more.
I will go away and stay with my mother.  She is good.  _You_ are bad!  I
hate you!  I hate you!  _I hate you_!  _And I hate her_!"--pointing
toward the new wife, who sat in horrified condemnation, with two fiery
spots upon her outraged cheeks.

"Jemima!" thundered her father in his angriest tone.

But the little girl turned upon him furiously.

"My name is not Jemima!" she screamed.  "I will not let you call me so.
My name is Dawn.  My mother called me Dawn.  I will not answer when you
call me Jemima."

"Jemima, you may go to your room!" commanded the father, standing up,
white to the lips, to face a will no whit less adamant than his own.

"I will not go until you call me Dawn," she answered, her face turning
white and stern, with sudden singular likeness to her father on its soft
round outlines.

She stood her ground until carried struggling upstairs and locked into
her own room.

Gradually she had cried her fury out, and succumbed to the inevitable,
creeping back as seldom as possible into the life of the house, and
spending the time with her own brooding thoughts and sad plays, far in
the depths of the box-boarded garden, or shut into the quiet of her own
room.

To the new mother she never spoke unless she had to, and never called
her Mother, though there were many struggles to compel her to do so.
She never came when they called her Jemima, nor obeyed a command
prefaced by that name, though she endured in consequence many a whipping
and many a day in bed, fed on bread and water.

"What is the meaning of this strange whim?" demanded the new wife, with
