to each other. We rarely detected her even in looking at us. She had a
way of sitting for hours together in the same part of the room,
without ever changing her position, without occupation of any kind,
without uttering a word, or breathing a sigh. I soon discovered that
she was not lost in thought, at these periods (as I had at first
supposed): but lost in a strange lethargy of body and mind; a
comfortless, waking trance, into which she fell from sheer physical
weakness--it was like the vacancy and feebleness of a first
convalescence, after a long illness. She never changed: never looked
better, never worse. I often spoke to her: I tried hard to show my
sympathy, and win her confidence and friendship. The poor lady was
always thankful, always spoke to me gratefully and kindly, but very
briefly. She never told me what were her sufferings or her sorrows.
The story of that lonely, lingering life was an impenetrable mystery
for her own family--for her husband and her daughter, as well as for
me. It was a secret between her and God.

With Mrs. Sherwin as the guardian to watch over Margaret, it may
easily be imagined that I felt none of the heavier oppressions of
restraint. Her presence, as the third person appointed to remain with
us, was not enough to repress the little endearments to which each
evening's lesson gave rise; but was just sufficiently perceptible to
invest them with the character of stolen endearments, and to make them
all the more precious on that very account. Mrs. Sherwin never knew, I
never thoroughly knew myself till later, how much of the secret of my
patience under my year's probation lay in her conduct, while she was
sitting in the room with Margaret and me.

In this solitude where I now write--in the change of life and of all
life's hopes and enjoyments which has come over me--when I look back