by the shores of the lake, the very words had now come true.  “Oh, if I could only be buried with your mother!  If I could only wake at her side when the angel’s trumpet sounds and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!” Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to death—­the lost creature had wandered in God’s leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach!  In that sacred rest I leave her—­in that dread companionship let her remain undisturbed.

So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom.  Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night.  Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead.

III

Four months elapsed.  April came—­the month of spring—­the month of change.

The course of time had flowed through the interval since the winter peacefully and happily in our new home.  I had turned my long leisure to good account, had largely increased my sources of employment, and had placed our means of subsistence on surer grounds.  Freed from the suspense and the anxiety which had tried her so sorely and hung over her so long, Marian’s spirits rallied, and her natural energy of character began to assert itself again, with something, if not all, of the freedom and the vigour of former times.

More pliable under change than her sister, Laura showed more plainly the progress made by the healing influences of her new life.  The worn and wasted look which had prematurely aged her face was fast leaving it, and the expression which had been the first of its charms in past days was the first of its beauties that now returned.  My closest observations of her detected but one serious result of the conspiracy which had once threatened her reason and her life.  Her memory of events, from the period of her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of our meeting in the burial-ground of Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond all hope of recovery.  At the slightest reference to that time she changed and trembled still, her words became confused, her memory wandered and lost itself as helplessly as ever.  Here, and here only, the traces of the past lay deep—­too deep to be effaced.

In all else she was now so far on the way to recovery that, on her best and brightest days, she sometimes looked and spoke like the Laura of old times.  The happy change wrought its natural result in us both.  From their long slumber, on her side and on mine, those imperishable memories of our past life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and all alike, the memories of our love.