e accounted dead to-day! Anguish rises rebellious: It cannot
be.--It is a dream, a grievous mistake, to be explained away presently.
Love's giant strength would wrench its victim from death's grasp. Hope,
the very last to yield--or is it but an after-glow of hope?--will catch
at shadowy straws, ere it submits and sinks to rise no more.

None but the father, mother, and sister were at the bedside when the
young life ebbed away. Poor tortured souls! May they be strong enough to
bear the heavy trial. That night the father never shed a tear, nor the
next day, nor the next. It would have been better had grief found a
natural channel. He spoke but little, and mostly sat by the bed as if in
deep thought, until they carried her away.

The white wreaths had come,--and the black hearse; and graceful lilies,
their long stems bound together with white ribbons. Black crapes too,
and sable hues, to harmonise with a world of sorrow and darkness.

Then the blinds went up, and the world went on as before. I looked out
of the window; I recollect a boy's cap had got cast adrift on the branch
of a tree just opposite the house of sadness; a little crowd had
collected to do justice to the incident. "Would it get off, or gradually
perish where it hung?" was the question of paramount interest to that
particular little world.

But does the world really go on as before? Not quite. A fraction of our
globe has been disturbed, a balance lost. The blow that struck down one
brother or sister wounds many hearts, reverberates in circles small or
large, and it will take time to restore that fraction's equilibrium. It
is as when we break the peaceful surface of the water. First a thud, a
gash; next a circle, small, but broken and restless; then a larger one
and a larger, each and all gradually calming down to be at rest, with
the smooth untroubled waters beyond.

When a link in the chain of existences, near and dear to us, is snapped
asunder, we instinctively seek to close up the gap, to join hands and
succour one another. So Frida's heart went out to her father as he sat
brooding, with his eyes fixed on the desk with the little bust. It was
not till much later that I knew what she had suffered. She wished to
throw her arms round his neck and cry her little aching heart out, and
love him with her dead sister's love and her own, and let him cry too,
that love and sorrow could mingle. But he sat there, so forbidding, so
strange, that her arms fell, and