father had fled, crying over her Bible, looking in her boxes and drawers to feed her sorrow with the sight of the familiar things, alternating those periods with her old occupation of looking out of the windows.  In regard to myself, and Veronica, she evinced a distress at the responsibility which, she feared, must rest upon her.  Veronica, dark and silent, played such heart-piercing strains that father could not bear to hear her; so when she played, for he dared not ask her to desist, he went away.  To me she had scarcely spoken since the funeral.  She wore the same dress each day—­one of black silk—­and a small black mantle, pinned across her bosom.  Soon the doors began to open and shut after their old fashion, and people came and went as of old on errands of begging or borrowing.

At the table we felt a sense of haste; instead of lingering, as was our wont, we separated soon, with an indifferent air, as if we were called by business, not sent away by sorrow.  But if our eyes fell on a certain chair, empty against the wall, a cutting pang was felt, which was not at all concealed; for there were sudden breaks in our commonplace talk, which diverged into wandering channels, betraying the tension of feeling.

Many weeks passed, through which I endured an aching, aimless melancholy.  My thoughts continually drifted through the vacuum in our atmosphere, and returned to impress me with a disbelief in the enjoyment, or necessity of keeping myself employed with the keys of an instrument, which, let me strike ever so cunningly, it was certain I could never obtain mastery over.

One day I went to walk by the shore, for the first time since my return.  When I set my foot on the ground, the intolerable light of the brilliant day blazed through me; I was luminously dark, for it blinded me.  Picking my way over the beach, left bare by the tide, with my eyes fixed downward till I could see, I reached the point between our house and the lighthouse and turned toward the sea, inhaling its cool freshness.  I climbed out to a flat, low rock, on the point; it was dry in the sun, and the weeds hanging from its sides were black and crisp; I put my woolen shawl on it, and stretched myself along its edge.  Little pools meshed from the sea by the numberless rocks round me engrossed my attention.  How white and pellucid was the shallow near me—­no shadow but the shadow of my face bending over it—­nothing to ripple its surface, but my imperceptible breath!  By and by a bunch of knotted wrack floated in from the outside and lodged in a crevice; a minute creature with fringed feet darted from it and swam across it.  After the knotted wrack came the fragment of a green and silky substance, delicate enough to have been the remnant of a web, woven in the palace of Circe.  “There must be a current,” I thought, “which sends them here.”  And I watched the inlet for other waifs; but nothing more came.  Eye-like bubbles rose from among the fronds of the knotted wrack, and, sailing on uncertain voyages, broke one by one and were wrecked to nothingness.  The last vanished; the pool showed me the motionless shadow of my face again, on which I pondered, till I suddenly became aware of a slow, internal oscillation, which increased till I felt in a strange tumult.  I put my hand in the pool and troubled its surface.