ppose, indeed, he was the heir? Vesta's heart
fell, as she considered that a woman had best let business alone.

The young bride-mourner was an object of mingled admiration and sympathy
as she leaned on the arm of a kinsman and entered the Presbyterian kirk.
She was considered one of the great beauties of Maryland, and the young
Robert Breckenridge, fresh from Kentucky, on a visit to his brother, the
pastor, thought he had never seen Vesta's equal even in Kentucky; and,
as he gazed through her mourning veil, the pastor's Delaware wife heard
him whisper, "Divinity itself!"

The clear olive skin, eyes of gray twilight, eyebrows like midnight's
own arches, and luxuriant hair, were touched by grief as if a goddess
suffered; and, in her deep mourning robes, Vesta seemed a monarch's
daughter about to pass through some convent to her sainthood.

She had the height to give dignity to this beauty, and the grace to lift
pathos above weakness.

The minister's musical tones were wrought to consonance with this noble
human model, and he spoke of that ideal motherhood which, to every child
at the bier, seems real as the dripping bucket at the fairy's well--of
mother's love, trials, weakness, and immortality; of the absence of her
sympathy making the first great bereavement in life's progress; of her
nature abiding in us and her spirit hovering over, while we live.

Painted in the soft hues of personal experience, prescribed to her needs
with a physician's art, doing all that funeral talk can do to raise the
final tears from among the heartstrings and pour them in oblation upon
the corpse, the pastor's consolation had the effect of some mesmeric
hand that weakens our systems while it sublimates our feelings, and
Vesta's female nature was almost broken down.

Where could she lean for the close sympathy befitting such grief? Her
father was not here, and she had none but her husband--the husband of
less than a week, but still the nearest to her need.

On him she allowed herself to rest that solemn evening after her
mother's body had sought the ground. He was well again, for the time.

For the first time she was alone with him, and, as the shadows narrowed
their chamber, and they sat with no other light than a little wood
smouldering in the grate, he came to her and began to talk of childhood
and his own mother, of the little sorrows his mother had shared with
him, of domestic disagreements and happy love-making anew; how men feel