on its daily way. The panic-stricken servants took
their blind refuge in the duties proper to the hour. The footman softly
laid the table for dinner. The maid sat waiting in senseless doubt, with
the hot-water jugs for the bedrooms ranged near her in their customary
row. The gardener, who had been ordered to come to his master, with
vouchers for money that he had paid in excess of his instructions, said
his character was dear to him, and left the vouchers at his appointed
time. Custom that never yields, and Death that never spares, met on the
wreck of human happiness--and Death gave way.

Heavily the thunder-clouds of Affliction had gathered over the
house--heavily, but not at their darkest yet. At five, that evening,
the shock of the calamity had struck its blow. Before another hour had
passed, the disclosure of the husband's sudden death was followed by
the suspense of the wife's mortal peril. She lay helpless on her widowed
bed; her own life, and the life of her unborn child, trembling in the
balance.

But one mind still held possession of its resources--but one guiding
spirit now moved helpfully in the house of mourning.

If Miss Garth's early days had been passed as calmly and as happily
as her later life at Combe-Raven, she might have sunk under the cruel
necessities of the time. But the governess's youth had been tried in the
ordeal of family affliction; and she met her terrible duties with the
steady courage of a woman who had learned to suffer. Alone, she had
faced the trial of telling the daughters that they were fatherless.
Alone, she now struggled to sustain them, when the dreadful certainty of
their bereavement was at last impressed on their minds.

Her least anxiety was for the elder sister. The agony of Norah's grief
had forced its way outward to the natural relief of tears. It was not
so with Magdalen. Tearless and speechless, she sat in the room where
the revelation of her father's death had first reached her; her face,
unnaturally petrified by the sterile sorrow of old age--a white,
changeless blank, fearful to look at. Nothing roused, nothing melted
her. She only said, "Don't speak to me; don't touch me. Let me bear
it by myself"--and fell silent again. The first great grief which had
darkened the sisters' lives had, as it seemed, changed their everyday
characters already.

The twilight fell, and faded; and the summer night came brightly. As
the first carefully shaded light was kindled in the si