my mind
beneath its load of sorrow. I came to think that the Future was walled
up before me, that the energy and action of my life were at an end, that
I never could find any refuge but in the grave. I came to think so, I
say, but not in the first shock of my grief. It slowly grew to that.
If the events I go on to relate, had not thickened around me, in the
beginning to confuse, and in the end to augment, my affliction, it is
possible (though I think not probable), that I might have fallen at once
into this condition. As it was, an interval occurred before I fully knew
my own distress; an interval, in which I even supposed that its sharpest
pangs were past; and when my mind could soothe itself by resting on
all that was most innocent and beautiful, in the tender story that was
closed for ever.

When it was first proposed that I should go abroad, or how it came to be
agreed among us that I was to seek the restoration of my peace in change
and travel, I do not, even now, distinctly know. The spirit of Agnes so
pervaded all we thought, and said, and did, in that time of sorrow, that
I assume I may refer the project to her influence. But her influence was
so quiet that I know no more.

And now, indeed, I began to think that in my old association of her with
the stained-glass window in the church, a prophetic foreshadowing of
what she would be to me, in the calamity that was to happen in the
fullness of time, had found a way into my mind. In all that sorrow, from
the moment, never to be forgotten, when she stood before me with her
upraised hand, she was like a sacred presence in my lonely house. When
the Angel of Death alighted there, my child-wife fell asleep--they told
me so when I could bear to hear it--on her bosom, with a smile. From my
swoon, I first awoke to a consciousness of her compassionate tears, her
words of hope and peace, her gentle face bending down as from a purer
region nearer Heaven, over my undisciplined heart, and softening its
pain.

Let me go on.

I was to go abroad. That seemed to have been determined among us from
the first. The ground now covering all that could perish of my
departed wife, I waited only for what Mr. Micawber called the 'final
pulverization of Heep'; and for the departure of the emigrants.

At the request of Traddles, most affectionate and devoted of friends in
my trouble, we returned to Canterbury: I mean my aunt, Agnes, and I. We
proceeded by appointment straight to Mr. Micaw