The morning rose clear and bright.  The long storm was over, and the calm autumnal sunshine was now to return, with all its infinite repose and sweetness.  With the earliest dawn exploring parties were out in every direction along the southern slope of The Mountain, tracing the ravages of the great slide and the track it had followed.  It proved to be not so much a slide as the breaking off and falling of a vast line of cliff, including the dreaded Ledge.  It had folded over like the leaves of a half-opened book when they close, crushing the trees below, piling its ruins in a glacis at the foot of what had been the overhanging wall of the cliff, and filling up that deep cavity above the mansion-house which bore the ill-omened name of Dead Man’s Hollow.  This it was which had saved the Dudley mansion.  The falling masses, or huge fragments breaking off from them, would have swept the house and all around it to destruction but for this deep shelving dell, into which the stream of ruin was happily directed.  It was, indeed, one of Nature’s conservative revolutions; for the fallen masses made a kind of shelf, which interposed a level break between the inclined planes above and below it, so that the nightmare-fancies of the dwellers in the Dudley mansion, and in many other residences under the shadow of The Mountain, need not keep them lying awake hereafter to listen for the snapping of roots and the splitting of the rocks above them.

Twenty-four hours after the falling of the cliff, it seemed as if it had happened ages ago.  The new fact had fitted itself in with all the old predictions, forebodings, fears, and acquired the solidarity belonging to all events which have slipped out of the fingers of Time and dissolved in the antecedent eternity.

Old Sophy was lying dead in the Dudley mansion.  If there were tears shed for her, they could not be bitter ones; for she had lived out her full measure of days, and gone—­who could help fondly believing it?—­to rejoin her beloved mistress.  They made a place for her at the foot of the two mounds.  It was thus she would have chosen to sleep, and not to have wronged her humble devotion in life by asking to lie at the side of those whom she had served so long and faithfully.  There were very few present at the simple ceremony.  Helen Darley was one of these few.  The old black woman had been her companion in all the kind offices of which she had been the ministering angel to Elsie.

After it was all over, Helen was leaving with the rest, when Dudley Venner begged her to stay a little, and he would send her back:  it was a long walk; besides, he wished to say some things to her, which he had not had the opportunity of speaking.  Of course Helen could not refuse him; there must be many thoughts coming into his mind which he would wish to share with her who had known his daughter so long and been with her in her last days.

She returned into the great parlor with the wrought cornices and the medallion-portraits on the ceiling.