lying on the sofa. They went close to look--and found him dead by his
own hand.

VIII.

Drawing fast to its close, the Prologue reverts to the two girls--and
tells, in a few words, how the years passed with Anne and Blanche.

Lady Lundie more than redeemed the solemn pledge that she had given to
her friend. Preserved from every temptation which might lure her into
a longing to follow her mother's career; trained for a teacher's life,
with all the arts and all the advantages that money could procure,
Anne's first and only essays as a governess were made, under Lady
Lundie's own roof, on Lady Lundie's own child. The difference in the
ages of the girls--seven years--the love between them, which seemed,
as time went on, to grow with their growth, favored the trial of the
experiment. In the double relation of teacher and friend to little
Blanche, the girlhood of Anne Silvester the younger passed safely,
happily, uneventfully, in the modest sanctuary of home. Who could
imagine a contrast more complete than the contrast between her early
life and her mother's? Who could see any thing but a death-bed delusion
in the terrible question which had tortured the mother's last moments:
"Will she end like Me?"

But two events of importance occurred in the quiet family circle during
the lapse of years which is now under review. In eighteen hundred and
fifty-eight the household was enlivened by the arrival of Sir Thomas
Lundie. In eighteen hundred and sixty-five the household was broken up
by the return of Sir Thomas to India, accompanied by his wife.