w brought
out,--the little curiosities and pictures he had given her on their
wedding journey. She would ask how such and such a thing looked,
turning her pretty head to some kind visitor, as she ranged them on
the walls; and now and then she would have to lay the picture down and
cry a little, silently, as she remembered where Charles had told her
it would look best. Still, she sought to furnish the rooms as they had
planned them in their mind; she made her surroundings, as nearly as
she could, as they had pictured them together. One room she never went
into; it was the room Charles had meant to have for the nursery. She
had no child.

But she changed, as we all change, with the passing of the years. I
first remember her as a woman middle-aged, sweet-faced, hardly like a
widow, nor yet like an old maid. She was rather like a young girl in
love, with her lover absent on a long journey. She lived more with the
memory of her husband, she clung to him more, than if she had had a
child. She never married; you would have guessed that; but, after the
Professor's letter, she never quite seemed to realize that her husband
was dead. Was he not coming back to her?

Never in all my knowledge of dear English women have I known a woman
so much loved. In how many houses was she always the most welcome
guest! How often we boys would go to her for sympathy! I know she was
the confidante of all our love affairs. I cannot speak for girls; but
I fancy she was much the same with them. Many of us owed our life's
happiness to her. She would chide us gently in our pettiness and
folly, and teach us, by her very presence and example, what thing it
was that alone could keep life sweet. How well we all remember the
little Surrey cottage, the little home fireside where the husband had
never been! I think she grew to imagine his presence, even the
presence of children: boys, curly-headed, like Charles, and sweet,
blue-eyed daughters; and the fact that it was all imagining seemed but
to make the place more holy. Charles still lived to her as she had
believed him in the month that they were married; he lived through
life with her as her young love had fancied he would be. She never
thought of evil that might have occurred; of failing affection, of
cares. Her happiness was in her mind alone; so all the earthly part
was absent.

There were but two events in her life--that which was past and that
which was to come. She had lived through his loss; no