Throughout the night Edna crouched beside the bed, watching the wan
but lovely face of the young widow, and tenderly chafing the numb,
fair hands which lay so motionless on the coverlet. Children are
always sanguine, because of their ignorance of the stern, inexorable
realities of the untried future, and Edna could not believe that
death would snatch from the world one so beautiful and so necessary
to her prattling, fatherless infants. But morning showed no
encouraging symptoms, the stupor was unbroken, and at noon the
wife's spirit passed gently to the everlasting reunion.

Before sunrise on the ensuing day, a sad group clustered once more
under the dripping chestnuts, and where a pool of blood had dyed the
sod, a wide grave yawned. The coffins were lowered, the bodies of
Henry and Helen Dent rested side by side, and, as the mound rose
slowly above them, the solemn silence was broken by the faltering
voice of the surgeon, who read the burial service.

"Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is
full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he
fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. Yet, O
Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful
Saviour, deliver us not into the pains of eternal death!"

The melancholy rite ended, the party dispersed, the strangers took
their departure for their distant homes, and quiet reigned once more
in the small, dark cottage. But days and weeks brought to Edna no
oblivion of the tragic events which constituted the first great
epoch of her monotonous life. A nervous restlessness took possession
of her, she refused to occupy her old room, and insisted upon
sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her grandfather's bed. She