days and the dear voices of our loved ones make music in our ears;
and lo! God puts us in the crucible. The light of life--the hope of
all future years is blotted out; clouds of despair and the grim
night of an unbroken and unlifting desolation fall like a pall on
heart and brain; we dare not look heavenward, dreading another blow;
our anchor drags, we drift out into a hideous Dead Sea, where our
idol has gone down forever--and boasted faith and trust and patience
are swept like straws from our grasp in the tempest of woe; while
our human love cries wolfishly for its lost darling. Ah! we build
grand and gloomy mausoleums for our precious dead hopes, but, like
Artemisia, we refuse to sepulchre--we devour the bitter ashes of the
lost, and grimly and audaciously challenge Jehovah to take the
worthless, mutilated life that his wisdom reserves for other aims
and future toils. Job's wife is immortal and ubiquitous, haunting
the sorrow-shrouded chamber of every stricken human soul, and
fiendishly prompting the bleeding, crushed spirit to "curse God and
die." Edna had never contemplated the possibility of her
grandfather's death--it was a horror she had never forced herself to
front; and now that he was cut down in an instant, without even the
mournful consolation of parting words and farewell kisses, she asked
herself again and again: "What have I done, that God should punish
me so? I thought I was grateful, I thought I was doing my duty; but
oh! what dreadful sin have I committed, to deserve this awful
affliction?" During the long, ghostly watches of that winter night,
she recalled her past life, gilded by the old man's love, and could
remember no happiness with which he was not intimately connected,
and no sorrow that his hand had not soothed and lightened. The
future was now a blank, crossed by no projected paths, lit with no
ray of hope; and at daylight, when the cold, pale morning showed the
stony face of the corpse at her side, her unnatural composure broke