When we slowly recover from the tumult and passion of some violent
distress, a peculiar stillness falls upon the Mind, and the atmosphere
around it becomes in that stillness appallingly clear. We knew not,
while wrestling with our woe, the extent of its ravages. As a land the
day after a flood, as a field the day after a battle, is the sight of our
own sorrow, when we no longer have to steer its raging, but to endure the
destruction it has made. Distinct before Caroline Montfort's vision
stretched the waste of her misery--the Past, the Present, the Future, all
seemed to blend in one single Desolation. A strange thing it is how all
time will converge itself, as it were, into the burning-glass of a
moment! There runs a popular superstition that it is thus, in the
instant of death; that our whole existence crowds itself on the glazing
eye--a panorama of all we have done on earth just as the soul restores to
the earth its garment. Certes, there are hours in our being, long before
the last and dreaded one, when this phenomenon comes to warn us that, if
memory were always active, time would be never gone. Rose before this
woman--who, whatever the justice of Darrell's bitter reproaches, had a
nature lovely enough to justify his anguish at her loss--the image of
herself at that turning point of life, when the morning mists are dimmed
on our way, yet when a path chosen is a fate decided. Yes; she had
excuses, not urged to the judge who sentenced, nor estimated to their
full extent by the stern equity with which, amidst suffering and wrath,
he had desired to weigh her cause.

Caroline's mother, Mrs. Lindsay, was one of those parents who acquire an
extraordinary influence over their children by the union of caressing
manners with obstinate resolves. She never lost control of her temper
nor hold on her object. A slight, delicate, languid creature too, who
would be sure to go into a consumption if unkindly crossed. With much