'The saddest birds a season find to sing.'

SOUTHWELL.

'Never to fold the robe o'er secret pain,

Never, weighed down by memory's clouds again,

To bow thy head! Thou art gone home!'

MRS. HEMANS.

Mrs. Thornton came to see Mrs. Hale the next morning. She was

much worse. One of those sudden changes--those great visible

strides towards death, had been taken in the night, and her own

family were startled by the gray sunken look her features had

assumed in that one twelve hours of suffering. Mrs. Thornton--who

had not seen her for weeks--was softened all at once. She had

come because her son asked it from her as a personal favour, but

with all the proud bitter feelings of her nature in arms against

that family of which Margaret formed one.

She doubted the reality

of Mrs. Hale's illness; she doubted any want beyond a momentary

fancy on that lady's part, which should take her out of her

previously settled course of employment for the day. She told her

son that she wished they had never come near the place; that he

had never got acquainted with them; that there had been no such

useless languages as Latin and Greek ever invented. He bore all

this pretty silently; but when she had ended her invective

against the dead languages, he quietly returned to the short,

curt, decided expression of his wish that she should go and see

Mrs. Hale at the time appointed, as most likely to be convenient

to the invalid. Mrs. Thornton submitted with as bad a grace as

she could to her son's desire, all the time liking him the better

for having it; and exaggerating in her own mind the same notion

that he had of extraordinary goodness on his part in so

perseveringly keeping up with the Hales.

His goodness verging on weakness (as all the softer virtues did

in her mind), and her own contempt for Mr. and Mrs. Hale, and

positive dislike to Margaret, were the ideas which occupied Mrs.

Thornton, till she was struck into nothingness before the dark

shadow of the wings of the angel of death. There lay Mrs. Hale--a

mother like herself--a much younger woman than she was,--on the

bed from which there was no sign of hope that she might ever rise

again No more variety of light and shade for her in that darkened

room; no power of action, scarcely change of movement; faint

alternations of whispered sound and studious silence; and yet

that monotonous life seemed almost too much! When Mrs. Thornton,

strong and prosperous with life, came in, Mrs. Hale lay still,

although from the look on her face she was evidently conscious of

who it was.




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