emotions. A happy woman imperceptibly diffuses her happiness around
her; she has an influence that is something akin to the influence of a
sunshiny day. So, again, the melancholy of a melancholy woman is
invariably, though silently, infectious; and Mrs. Sherwin was one of
this latter order. Her pale, sickly, moist-looking skin; her large,
mild, watery, light-blue eyes; the restless timidity of her
expression; the mixture of useless hesitation and involuntary rapidity
in every one of her actions--all furnished the same significant
betrayal of a life of incessant fear and restraint; of a disposition
full of modest generosities and meek sympathies, which had been
crushed down past rousing to self-assertion, past ever seeing the
light. There, in that mild, wan face of hers--in those painful
startings and hurryings when she moved; in that tremulous, faint
utterance when she spoke--_there,_ I could see one of those ghastly
heart-tragedies laid open before me, which are acted and re-acted,
scene by scene, and year by year, in the secret theatre of home;
tragedies which are ever shadowed by the slow falling of the black
curtain that drops lower and lower every day--that drops, to hide all
at last, from the hand of death.

"We have had very beautiful weather lately, Sir," said Mrs. Sherwin,
almost inaudibly; looking as she spoke, with anxious eyes towards her
husband, to see if she was justified in uttering even those piteously
common-place words. "Very beautiful weather to be sure," continued the
poor woman, as timidly as if she had become a little child again, and
had been ordered to say her first lesson in a stranger's presence.

"Delightful weather, Mrs. Sherwin. I have been enjoying it for the
last two days in the country--in a part of Surrey (the neighbourhood
of Ewell) that I had not seen before."