mutilated life that his wisdom reserves for other aims and future toils.  Job’s wife is immortal and ubiquitous, haunting the sorrow-shrouded chamber of every stricken human soul, and fiendishly prompting the bleeding, crushed spirit to “curse God and die.”  Edna had never contemplated the possibility of her grandfather’s death—­it was a horror she had never forced herself to front; and now that he was cut down in an instant, without even the mournful consolation of parting words and farewell kisses, she asked herself again and again:  “What have I done, that God should punish me so?  I thought I was grateful, I thought I was doing my duty; but oh! what dreadful sin have I committed, to deserve this awful affliction?” During the long, ghostly watches of that winter night, she recalled her past life, gilded by the old man’s love, and could remember no happiness with which he was not intimately connected, and no sorrow that his hand had not soothed and lightened.  The future was now a blank, crossed by no projected paths, lit with no ray of hope; and at daylight, when the cold, pale morning showed the stony face of the corpse at her side, her unnatural composure broke up in a storm of passionate woe, and she sprang to her feet, almost frantic with the sense of her loss: 

“All alone! nobody to love me; nothing to look forward to!  Oh. grandpa! did you hear me praying for you yesterday?  Dear Grandy—­my own dear Grandy!  I did pray for you while you were dying—­here alone!  Oh, my God! what have I done, that you should take him away from me?  Was not I on my knees when he died?  Oh! what will become of me now?  Nobody to care for Edna now!  Oh, grandpa! grandpa! beg Jesus to ask God to take me too!” And throwing up her clasped hands, she sank back insensible on the shrouded form of the dead.

  “When some beloved voice that was to you
   Both sound and sweetness, faileth suddenly,
   And silence against which you dare not cry,
   Aches round you like a strong disease and new—­
   What hope? what help? what music will undo
   That silence to your senses?  Not friendship’s sigh,
   Not reason’s subtle count.  Nay, none of these! 
   Speak Thou, availing Christ! and fill this pause.”

CHAPTER III.

Of all that occurred during many ensuing weeks Edna knew little.  She retained, in after years, only a vague, confused remembrance of keen anguish and utter prostration, and an abiding sense of irreparable loss.  In delirious visions she saw her grandfather now struggling in the grasp of Phlegyas, and now writhing in the fiery tomb of Uberti, with jets of flame leaping through his white hair, and his shrunken hands stretched appealingly toward her, as she had seen those of the doomed Ghibelline leader, in the hideous Dante picture.  All the appalling images evoked by the sombre and embittered imagination of the gloomy Tuscan had seized upon her fancy, even in happy hours, and were now