How wearily the days passed during the month after the funeral!  The shadow of death seemed to darken everything.  Doors creaked dismally when they were opened.  The room where the body had been laid seemed to have grown a century older than the other parts of the once bright and cheerful house, —­its atmosphere was so stagnant and full of mould.  The family spoke only in suppressed tones; their countenances were as sad as their garments.  All this was terrible to the impressible, imaginative, and naturally buoyant temper of Mildred.  It was like dwelling in a tomb, and her heart cried out for very loneliness.  She must do something to take her mind out of the sunless vault,—­she must resume her relations with the dwellers in the upper air.  All at once she thought of her father’s last words,—­of Ralph Hardwick, and the ebony cabinet.  It was in the next room.  She opened the door, half expecting to see some bodiless presence in the silent space.  She could hear her own heart beat between the tickings of the great Dutch clock, as she stepped across the floor.  How still was everything!  The air tingled in her ears as though now disturbed for the first time.

She opened the cabinet, which was not locked, and pulled out the middle drawer.  She found nothing but a dried rose-bud and a lock of sunny hair wrapped in a piece of yellowed paper.  Was it her mother’s hair?  As Mildred remembered her mother, the color of her hair was dark, not golden.  Still it might have been cut in youth, before its hue had deepened.  And what a world of mystery, of feeling, of associations there was in that scentless and withered rose-bud!  What fair hand had first plucked it?  What pledge did it carry?  Was the subtile aroma of love ever blended with its fragrance?  Had her father borne it with him in his wanderings?  The secret was in his coffin.  The struggling lips could not utter it before they were stiffened into marble.  Yet she could not believe that these relics were the sole things to which he had referred.  There must have been something that more nearly concerned her,—­something in which the blacksmith or his nephew was interested.

CHAPTER II.

In order to show the position of Mrs. Kinloch and her son in our story, it will be necessary to make the reader acquainted with some previous occurrences.

Six years before this date, Mrs. Kinloch was the Widow Branning.  Her husband’s small estate had melted like a snow-bank in the liquidation of his debts.  She had only one child, Hugh, to support; but in a country town there is generally little that a woman can do to earn a livelihood; and she might often have suffered from want, if the neighbors had not relieved her.  If she left her house for any errand, (locks were but seldom used in Innisfield,) she would often on her return find a leg of mutton, a basket of apples or potatoes, or a sack of flour, conveyed there by some unknown hands.  In winter nights she would hear the voices of Ralph Hardwick, the village blacksmith, and his boys, as they drew sled-loads of wood, ready cut and split, to keep up her kitchen fire.  Other friends ploughed and planted her garden, and performed numberless kind offices.  But, though aided in this way by charity, Mrs. Branning never lost her self-respect nor her standing in the neighborhood.