on my hands. My eyes were on the printed page, but I was not reading; my
mind was full of these thoughts, my heart of great discouragement and
despondency,--a sense that I could do nothing, yet that there surely must
and ought, if I but knew it, be something to do. The fire which Morphew
had built up before dinner was dying out, the shaded lamp on my table
left all the corners in a mysterious twilight. The house was perfectly
still, no one moving: my father in the library, where, after the habit of
many solitary years, he liked to be left alone, and I here in my retreat,
preparing for the formation of similar habits. I thought all at once of
the third member of the party, the new-comer, alone too in the room that
had been hers; and there suddenly occurred to me a strong desire to take
up my lamp and go to the drawing-room and visit her, to see whether her
soft, angelic face would give any inspiration. I restrained, however,
this futile impulse,--for what could the picture say?--and instead
wondered what might have been had she lived, had she been there, warmly
enthroned beside the warm domestic centre, the hearth which would have
been a common sanctuary, the true home. In that case what might have
been? Alas! the question was no more simple to answer than the other: she
might have been there alone too, her husband's business, her son's
thoughts, as far from her as now, when her silent representative held her
old place in the silence and darkness. I had known it so, often enough.
Love itself does not always give comprehension and sympathy. It might be
that she was more to us there, in the sweet image of her undeveloped
beauty, than she might have been had she lived and grown to maturity and
fading, like the rest.

I cannot be certain whether my mind was still lingering on this not very
cheerful reflection, or if it had been left behind, when the strange
occurrence came of which I have now to tell. Can I call it an occurrence?
My eyes were on my book, when I thought I heard the sound of a door