n fire. Connie holding by
her skirts, pushing her on, went along the corridor to the other door,
now deserted, of Lady Mary's room. "There, there! don't you see her? She
is going in!" the child cried, and rushed on, clinging to Mary, dragging
her on, her light hair streaming, her little white dress waving.

Lady Mary's room was unoccupied and cold,--cold, though it was summer,
with the chill that rests in uninhabited apartments. The blinds were
drawn down over the windows; a sort of blank whiteness, greyness, was in
the place, which no one ever entered. The child rushed on with eager
gestures, crying, "Look! look!" turning her lively head from side to
side. Mary, in a still and passive expectation, seeing nothing, looking
mechanically to where Connie told her to look, moving like a creature
in a dream, against her will, followed. There was nothing to be seen. The
blank, the vacancy, went to her heart. She no longer thought of Connie
or her vision. She felt the emptiness with a desolation such as she had
never felt before. She loosed her arm with something like impatience from
the child's close clasp. For months she had not entered the room which
was associated with so much of her life. Connie and her cries and
warnings passed from her mind like the stir of a bird or a fly. Mary felt
herself alone with her dead, alone with her life, with all that had been
and that never could be again. Slowly, without knowing what she did, she
sank upon her knees. She raised her face in the blank of desolation about
her to the unseen heaven. Unseen! unseen! whatever we may do. God above
us, and those who have gone from us, and He who has taken them, who has
redeemed them, who is ours and theirs, our only hope,--but all unseen,
unseen, concealed as much by the blue skies as by the dull blank of that
roof. Her heart ached and cried into the unknown. "O God," she cried, "I
do not know where she is, but Thou art everywhere. O God, let her know
that I have never blamed her, never wished it otherwise, never ceased to
love her, and thank her, and bless her. God! God!" cried Mary, with a
great and urgent cry, as if it were a man's name. She knelt there for a
moment before her senses failed her, her eyes shining as if they would
burst from their sockets, her lips dropping apart, her countenance like
marble.

XIII.

"And _she_ was standing there all the time," said Connie, crying and
telling her little tale after Mary had been carried aw