comedy, the death of her reverend husband's first wife. It happened
on a spring evening, and she who now and for many years had filled
that first wife's place was then parlour-maid in the parson's house.

When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was
announced, she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents, who
were living in the same village, to tell them the sad news. As she
opened the white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose
westward, shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she
discerned, without much surprise, the figure of a man standing in the
hedge, though she roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form, 'Oh, Sam,
how you frightened me!'

He was a young gardener of her acquaintance. She told him the
particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young
people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic mind which is engendered
when a tragedy has happened close at hand, and has not happened to
the philosophers themselves. But it had its bearing upon their
relations.

'And will you stay on now at the Vicarage, just the same?' asked he.

She had hardly thought of that. 'Oh, yes--I suppose!' she said.
'Everything will be just as usual, I imagine?'

He walked beside her towards her mother's. Presently his arm stole
round her waist. She gently removed it; but he placed it there
again, and she yielded the point. 'You see, dear Sophy, you don't
know that you'll stay on; you may want a home; and I shall be ready
to offer one some day, though I may not be ready just yet.