no one should
be summoned to her funeral: that was so like her brave, sensible
nature; she desired the grief for her to be wholesome and temperate
grief, with no lingering over the sad accidents of mortality. Hugh
felt the strong bond of friendship, that had existed between them, grow
and blossom into a vigorous and enduring love. She seemed close beside
him all that day, approving his efforts after a joyful tranquillity.
He could almost see her, if he sank for a moment into a tearful sorrow,
casting upward that impatient look he knew so well, if any instance of
human weakness were related in her presence.

And thus the death of his old friend seemed, as the day drew on, to
have brought a strange brightness into his life, by making the dark
less terrible, the unknown more familiar. She was there, with the same
brave courtesy, the same wholesome scorn, the same humorous
decisiveness; and though the thought of the gap came like an ache into
his mind, again and again, he resolved that he would not yield to
ineffectual sadness; but that he would be worthy of the friendship
which she had given him, not easily, he remembered, but after long
testing and weighing his character; and that he would be faithful--he
prayed that he might be that--to so pure and generous a gift.

XL

A Funeral Pomp--The Daily Manna--The Lapsing Moment

In Hugh's temperament, sensitive and eager as it was, there was a
strong tendency to live in the future and in the past rather than in
the present. In the past, he realised, he could live without dismay
and without languor, because the mind has so extraordinary a power of
sifting its memories, of throwing away and disregarding all that is
sordid, ugly, and base, and retaining only the finest gold. But there
was a danger in dwelling too much upon the future, because the anxious
mind, fertile in imagination, was so apt to weave for itself pictures
of discouragement and failure, sad dilemmas, dreary dishonours,
calamities, shadows, woes. How often had the thought of what might be
in store clouded the pure sunshine of some bright day of summer; how
often had the thought of isolation, of loss, of bereavement, hung like
a cloud between himself and his intercourse even with those whom he
most feared to lose! He thought sometimes of that sad and yet bracing
sentiment, uttered by one whose life had been filled with every delight
that wealth, guided by cultivated taste, could purchase. "My li