e to speak,
pushed over to him the letter which contained the fatal news. In such a
case human consolation cannot reach the sorrow. It passes like the idle
wind over the wounded heart. All that _could_ be done by words, and
looks, and acts of sympathy Walter did; and then went to arrange for
Kenrick's immediate journey, not returning till he came to tell him that
a carriage was waiting to take him to the train.

That evening Kenrick reached the house of death, which was still as
death itself. The old faithful servant opened the door to his knock,
and using her apron to wipe her eyes, which were red with long weeping,
she exclaimed--

"O Master Harry, Master Harry, she's gone. She had been reading and
praying in her room, and then she came down to me quite bright and
cheerful, when the spasms took her, and I helped her to bed, and she
died."

Harry flung down his hat in the hall, and rushed up stairs to his
mother's room, but when he had opened the door, he stood awe-struck and
motionless--for he was alone in the presence of the dead.

The light of winter sunset was streaming over her, whose life had been a
winter day. Never even in life had he seen her so lovely, so beautiful
with the beauty of an angel, as now with the smiling never-broken calm
of death upon her. Over the pure pale face, from which every wrinkle
made by care and sorrow had vanished, streamed the last cold radiance of
evening, Illuminating the peaceful smile, and seeming to linger lovingly
as it lit up strange glories in the golden hair, smoothed in soft bands
over her brow. There she lay with her hands folded, as though in
prayer, upon her quiet breast; and the fitful fever of life had passed
away. Dead--with the smile of heaven upon her lips, which should never
leave them more!

Hers had been a hard, mysterious life. In all the sweet bloom of her
youthful beauty she had left her rich home, not, indeed, without the
sanction, but against the wishes of her relatives, to brave trial and
poverty with the man she loved. How bitter that poverty, how severe,
how unexpected those trials had proved to be, we have seen already; and
then, still young, as though she were meant to tread with her tender
feet the whole thorny round of human sorrow, she had been left a widow
with an only son. And during the eight years of her widowed loneliness,
her relatives had neglected with cold pride both her and her orphan boy;
even that orphan boy, in the mids