om none of us quite liked and all a little
feared; who seemed to rise out of the ground, and came and went, no one
knew whence or whither, exercising, as I imagined, a mysterious authority
over him? Was it all good and true, or a heresy and a witchcraft? Oh, my
beloved father! was it all well with you?

When Lady Knollys entered, she found me in floods of tears, walking
distractedly up and down the room. She kissed me in silence; she walked
back and forward with me, and did her best to console me.

'I think, Cousin Monica, I would wish to see him once more. Shall we go
up?'

'Unless you really wish it very much, I think, darling, you had better not
mind it. It is happier to recollect them as they were; there's a change,
you know, darling, and there is seldom any comfort in the sight.'

'But I do wish it _very_ much. Oh! won't you come with me?'

And so I persuaded her, and up we went hand in hand, in the deepening
twilight; and we halted at the end of the dark gallery, and I called Mrs.
Rusk, growing frightened.

'Tell her to let us in, Cousin Monica,' I whispered.

'She wishes to see him, my lady--does she?' enquired Mrs. Rusk, in an
under-tone, and with a mysterious glance at me, as she softly fitted the
key to the lock.

'Are you quite sure, Maud, dear?'

'Yes, yes.'

But when Mrs. Rusk entered bearing the candle, whose beam mixed dismally
with the expiring twilight, disclosing a great black coffin standing upon
trestles, near the foot of which she took her stand, gazing sternly into
it, I lost heart again altogether and drew back.

'No, Mrs. Rusk, she won't; and I am very glad, dear,' she added to me.
'Come, Mrs. Rusk, come away. Yes, darling,' she continued to me, 'it is
much better for you;' and she hurried me away, and down-stairs again. But
the awful outlines of that large black coffin remained upon my imagination
with a new and terrible sense of death.

I had no more any wish to see him. I felt a horror even of the room, and
for more than an hour after a kind of despair and terror, such as I have
never experienced before or since at the idea of death.

Cousin Monica had had her bed placed in my room, and Mary Quince's moved to
the dressing-room adjoining it. For the first time the superstitious awe
that follows death, but not immediately, visited me. The idea of seeing my
father enter the room, or open the door and look in, haunted me. After Lady
Knollys and I were in bed, I could not sleep. The