“Agnes looked at her with sad but earnest admiration, and exclaimed in a quivering-voice as she pressed her to her bosom,

“Oh Jane, Jane, how my heart loves you!—­the day is coming, my sister—­our sweetest, our youngest, our dearest—­the day is coming when we will see you no more—­when your sorrows and your joys, whether real or imaginary—­when all the unsettled evidences of goodness, which nothing could destroy, will be gone; and you with all you’ve suffered—­with all your hopes and fears, will be no longer present for our hearts to gather about.  Oh my sister, my sister! how will the old man live!  He will not—­he will not.  We see already that he suffers, and what it costs him to be silent.  His gait is feeble and infirm is and head bent since the’ hand of afiliction has come upon you.  Yet, Jane, Jane, we could bear all, provided you were permitted to remain with us!  Your voice—­your voice—­and is the day so soon to come when we will not hear it? when our eyes will no more rest upon you?  And”—­added the affectionate girl, now overcome by her feelings, laying her calm sister’s head at the same time upon her bosom, “and when those locks so brown and rich that your Agnes’s hands have so often dressed, will be mouldering in the grave, and that face—­oh, the seal of death is upon your pale, pale cheek, my sister!—­my sister!” She could say no more, but kissed Jane’s lips, and pressing her to her heart, she wept in a long fit of irrepressible grief.

Jane looked up with a pensive gaze into Agnes’s face, and as she calmly dried her sister’s tears, said:—­

“Is it not strange, Agnes, that I who am the Queen of Sorrow cannot weep.  I resemble some generous princess, who though rich, gives away her wealth to the needy in such abundance that she is always poor herself.  I who weep not, supply you all with tears, and cannot find one for myself when I want it.  Indeed so it seems, my sister.”

“It is true, indeed, Jane—­too true, too true, my darling.”

“Agnes, I could tell you a secret.  It is not without reason that I am the Queen of Sorrow.”

“Alas, it is not, my sweet innocent.”

“I have the secret here,” said she, putting her hand to her bosom, “and no one suspects that I have.  The cause why I am the Queen of Sorrow is indeed here—­here.  But come, I do not much like this arbor somehow.  There is, I think, a reason for it, but I forget it.  Let us walk elsewhere.”

This was the arbor of osiers in which Osborne in the enthusiasm of his passion, said that if during his travels he found a girl more beautiful, he would cease to love Jane, and to write to her—­an expression which, as the reader knows, exercised afterwards a melancholy power upon her intellect.

Agnes and she proceeded as she desired, to saunter about, which they did for the most part in silence, except when she wished to stop and make an observation of her own free will.  Her step was slow, her face pale, and her gait, alas, quite feeble, and evidently that of a worn frame and a broken heart.