“You are very good,” replied she, “to have come yourself; I can never thank you sufficiently; but it is too late.”

“Too late,” cried I, “what do you mean?  It is not too late to take you from this deserted place, and conduct you to—–­”

My own loss, which I had forgotten as I spoke, now made me turn away, while choking grief impeded my speech.  I threw open the window, and looked on the cold, waning, ghastly, misshaped circle on high, and the chill white earth beneath—­did the spirit of sweet Idris sail along the moon-frozen crystal air?—­No, no, a more genial atmosphere, a lovelier habitation was surely hers!

I indulged in this meditation for a moment, and then again addressed the mourner, who stood leaning against the bed with that expression of resigned despair, of complete misery, and a patient sufferance of it, which is far more touching than any of the insane ravings or wild gesticulation of untamed sorrow.  I desired to draw her from this spot; but she opposed my wish.  That class of persons whose imagination and sensibility have never been taken out of the narrow circle immediately in view, if they possess these qualities to any extent, are apt to pour their influence into the very realities which appear to destroy them, and to cling to these with double tenacity from not being able to comprehend any thing beyond.  Thus Lucy, in desert England, in a dead world, wished to fulfil the usual ceremonies of the dead, such as were customary to the English country people, when death was a rare visitant, and gave us time to receive his dreaded usurpation with pomp and circumstance—­going forth in procession to deliver the keys of the tomb into his conquering hand.  She had already, alone as she was, accomplished some of these, and the work on which I found her employed, was her mother’s shroud.  My heart sickened at such detail of woe, which a female can endure, but which is more painful to the masculine spirit than deadliest struggle, or throes of unutterable but transient agony.

This must not be, I told her; and then, as further inducement, I communicated to her my recent loss, and gave her the idea that she must come with me to take charge of the orphan children, whom the death of Idris had deprived of a mother’s care.  Lucy never resisted the call of a duty, so she yielded, and closing the casements and doors with care, she accompanied me back to Windsor.  As we went she communicated to me the occasion of her mother’s death.  Either by some mischance she had got sight of Lucy’s letter to Idris, or she had overheard her conversation with the countryman who bore it; however it might be, she obtained a knowledge of the appalling situation of herself and her daughter, her aged frame could not sustain the anxiety and horror this discovery instilled—­she concealed her knowledge from Lucy, but brooded over it through sleepless nights, till fever and delirium, swift forerunners of death, disclosed the secret.  Her life, which had long been hovering on its extinction, now yielded at once to the united effects of misery and sickness, and that same morning she had died.