While I sat looking up at the portrait, I grew strangely and suddenly
calm before it. My memory flew back to a long illness that I had
suffered from, as a child, when my little cradle-couch was placed by
my mother's bedside, and she used to sit by me in the dull evenings
and hush me to sleep. The remembrance of this brought with it a dread
imagining that she might now be hushing my spirit, from her place
among the angels of God. A stillness and awe crept over me; and I hid
my face in my hands.

The striking of the hour from a clock in the room, startled me back to
the outer world. I left the house and went at once to North Villa.

Margaret and her father and mother were in the drawing-room when I
entered it. I saw immediately that neither of the two latter had
passed the morning calmly. The impending event of the day had
exercised its agitating influence over them, as well as over me. Mrs.
Sherwin's face was pale to her very lips: not a word escaped her. Mr.
Sherwin endeavoured to assume the self-possession which he was
evidently far from feeling, by walking briskly up and down the room,
and talking incessantly--asking the most common-place questions, and
making the most common-place jokes. Margaret, to my surprise, showed
fewer symptoms of agitation than either of her parents. Except when
the colour came and went occasionally on her cheek, I could detect no
outward evidences of emotion in her at all.

The church was near at hand. As we proceeded to it, the rain fell
heavily, and the mist of the morning was thickening to a fog. We had
to wait in the vestry for the officiating clergyman. All the gloom and
dampness of the day seemed to be collected in this room--a dark, cold,
melancholy place, with one window which opened on a burial-ground