After a few
minutes of that nameless anguish which thought dares not dwell
upon, nor words describe, she saw his eyes open and turn to
her with an expression of intense inquiry, full of the
consciousness of death, of the sense of a coming eternity, and
of that question, deferred too long, and asked too late, "What
shall I do to be saved?"

She bent over him in speechless sorrow; his dying eyes caught
sight of the cross which hung from her neck; she saw it; she
held it to his lips, and whispered, "None ever perished at His
feet."

He heard her; and his lips moved, and his hand grasped hers;
he looked at her, raised his eyes to Heaven,--and he died.

On that murmured prayer, on that expiring glance, she built
hopes which we may not scan,--which we dare not judge. We dare
not break the bruised but not broken reed on which she leant,
nor quench the uncertain light which its memory threw upon the
remaining years of her earthly pilgrimage.

When the clergyman arrived, he found her still on her knees by
the bed of death, still covered with the blood of her dead
husband. He has often since said, that when she rose from her
knees, and silently held out her hand to him, it was with a
reverence mingled with awe that he took it. He felt (this was
his expression) that she had drawn very near to God in the
prayers which she had poured forth in that chamber of death,
during its first and solemn hour of silence and of loneliness.

It was an irksome and trying task which Mr. Lacy, from a sense
of duty, and of profound interest and pity, had undertaken;
and the part of it which he most dreaded was now at hand. For
those he had left behind, he felt the sincerest compassion,
and for Alice, the highest admiration. When he had drawn near
to Elmsley, he had formed beforehand a tolerably just idea of
the situation and state of mind of its inmates. He had
expected to find a woman bowed down with grief, worn out with
sorrow, and by her side another, more like an angelic than a
human being, and such were those he had seen. He had expected
to find a man with a mind weakened, torn by a keen remorse,
and still struggling with unconquered passions; he had heard
with his own ears the confirmation of his anticipations, and
he had left him, sinking under that delirious agony which he
had struggled with long, and mastered for one moment, but
which had subdued him at last. He had sent one of these
sufferers to the bed-side of his dying penitent,