and when all was over they carried her senseless from the room. I
remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses, she
passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into her
room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at last
persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw with
the cry: "Good God! Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so; her hair,
black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large grey eyes,
had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey in that night
of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in exquisite silver
bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.

I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life. He
was keenly intellectual, and splendidly educated; a mathematician and a
good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of Queen Mab.
Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
the room by his light playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected by
the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the wife
that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her darling at
the last.

This scepticism of his was not wholly shared by his wife, who held to the