he first time I came to a long pause. The picture had an
influence that quieted me; but what influence I hardly knew. Perhaps
it led my spirit up to the spirit that had gone from us--perhaps those
secret voices from the unknown world, which only the soul can listen to,
were loosed at that moment, and spoke within me. While I sat looking up
at the portrait, I grew strangely and suddenly calm before it. My memory
flew back to a long illness that I had suffered from, as a child, when
my little cradle-couch was placed by my mother's bedside, and she used
to sit by me in the dull evenings and hush me to sleep. The remembrance
of this brought with it a dread imagining that she might now be hushing
my spirit, from her place among the angels of God. A stillness and awe
crept over me; and I hid my face in my hands.

The striking of the hour from a clock in the room, startled me back to
the outer world. I left the house and went at once to North Villa.

Margaret and her father and mother were in the drawing-room when I
entered it. I saw immediately that neither of the two latter had passed
the morning calmly. The impending event of the day had exercised its
agitating influence over them, as well as over me. Mrs. Sherwin's
face was pale to her very lips: not a word escaped her. Mr. Sherwin
endeavoured to assume the self-possession which he was evidently far
from feeling, by walking briskly up and down the room, and talking
incessantly--asking the most common-place questions, and making the most
common-place jokes. Margaret, to my surprise, showed fewer symptoms of
agitation than either of her parents. Except when the colour came and
went occasionally on her cheek, I could detect no outward evidences of
emotion in her at all.

The church was near at hand. As we proceeded to it, the rain fell
heavily, and the mist of the morning was thickening to a fog. We had
to wait in the vestry for the officiating clergyman. All the gloom and
dampness of the day seemed to be collected in this room--a dark, cold,
melancholy place, with one window which opened on a burial-ground
steaming in the wet. The rain pattered monotonously on the pavement
outside. While Mr. Sherwin exchanged remarks on the weather with the
clerk, (a tall, lean man, arrayed in a black gown), I sat silent, near
Mrs. Sherwin and Margaret, looking with mechanical attention at the
white surplices which hung before me in a half-opened cupboard--at the
bottle of water and tumble