ice of the
imagination caused me to conjecture that some ill had occurred to Clara or
Evelyn, rather than to this aged lady. Our fears, for ever on the stretch,
demanded a nourishment of horror; and it seemed too natural an occurrence,
too like past times, for the old to die before the young. I found the
venerable mother of my Idris lying on a couch, her tall emaciated figure
stretched out; her face fallen away, from which the nose stood out in sharp
profile, and her large dark eyes, hollow and deep, gleamed with such light
as may edge a thunder cloud at sun-set. All was shrivelled and dried up,
except these lights; her voice too was fearfully changed, as she spoke to
me at intervals. "I am afraid," said she, "that it is selfish in me to have
asked you to visit the old woman again, before she dies: yet perhaps it
would have been a greater shock to hear suddenly that I was dead, than to
see me first thus."

I clasped her shrivelled hand: "Are you indeed so ill?" I asked.

"Do you not perceive death in my face," replied she, "it is strange; I
ought to have expected this, and yet I confess it has taken me unaware. I
never clung to life, or enjoyed it, till these last months, while among
those I senselessly deserted: and it is hard to be snatched immediately
away. I am glad, however, that I am not a victim of the plague; probably I
should have died at this hour, though the world had continued as it was in
my youth."

She spoke with difficulty, and I perceived that she regretted the necessity
of death, even more than she cared to confess. Yet she had not to complain
of an undue shortening of existence; her faded person shewed that life had
naturally spent itself. We had been alone at first; now Clara entered; the
Countess turned to her with a smile, and took the hand of this lovely
child; her roseate palm and snowy fingers, contrasted with relaxed fibres
and yellow hue of those of her aged friend; she bent to kiss her, touching
her withered mouth with the warm, full lips of youth. "Verney," said the
Countess, "I need not recommend this dear girl to you, for your own sake
you will preserve her. Were the world as it was, I should have a thousand
sage precautions to impress, that one so sensitive, good, and beauteous,
might escape the dangers that used to lurk for the destruction of the fair
and excellent. This is all nothing now.

"I commit you, my kind nurse, to your uncle's care; to yours I entrust the
dearest relic of my