Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that,
in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could
hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a
long summer's day."

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were
before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their
cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across
the blackness only makes it blacker.

Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi di tempo felice
Nella miseria;

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the
tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the
suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with _his_ little
pictures, _Pictures of the Past_, presenting a dreadfully unattractive
Charlotte.

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of
Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the
poor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle
Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with
her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt
like praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he came
away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotte
observed my depression," Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So I