He sent me a watch.  I was to wear it from the second of July.  It was small and plain, but there were a few words scratched inside the case with the point of a knife, which I read every day.  Veronica’s eye fell on it the first time I put it on.

“What time is it?”

“Near one.”

“I thought, from the look of it, that it might be near two.”

“Don’t mar my ideal of you, Verry, by growing witty.”

She shrugged her shoulders.  “I guess you found it washed ashore, among the rocks; was it bruised?”

“A man gave it to me.”

“A merman, who fills the sea-halls with a voice of power?”

“May be.”

“Tut, Ben gave it to you.  It is a kind of housekeepish present; did he add scissors and needle-case?”

“What if the merman should take me some day to the ’pale sea-groves straight and high?’”

“You must never, never go.  You cannot leave me, Cass!” She grasped my sleeve, and pulled me round.  “How much was there for you to do in the life before us, which you talked about?”

“I remember.  There is much, to be sure.”

Fanny’s quick eye caught the glitter of the watch.  The mystery teased her, but she said nothing.

Aunt Merce had gone to Rosville with Arthur.  There was no visitor with us; there had been none beside Ben since mother died.  All seemed kept at bay.  I wrote to Helen to come and pass the summer, but her child was too young for such a journey, she concluded.  Ben had sailed for Switzerland.  The summer, whose biography like an insignificant life must be written in a few words, was a long one to live through.  It happened to be a dry season, which was unfrequent on our coast.  Days rolled by without the variation of wind, rain, or hazy weather.  The sky was an opaque blue till noon, when solid white clouds rose in the north, and sailed seaward, or barred the sunset, which turned them crimson and black.  The mown fields grew yellow under the stare of the brassy sun, and the leaves cracked and curled for the want of moisture.  It was dull in the village, no ships were building, none sailed, none arrived.  But father was more absorbed than ever, more away from home.  He wrote often in the evening, and pored over ledgers with his bookkeeper.  Late at night I found him sorting and reading papers.  He forgot us.  But Fanny, as he grew forgetful, improved as housekeeper.  Her energy was untiring; she waited so much on him that I grew forgetful of him.  Veronica was the same as before; her room was pleasant with color and perfume, the same delicate pains with her dress each day was taken.  She looked as fair as a lily, as serene as the lake on which it floats, except when Fanny tried her.  With me she never lost temper.  But I saw little of her; she was as fixed in her individual pursuits as ever.

There were intervals now when all my grief for mother returned, and I sat in my darkened chamber, recalling with a sad persistence her gestures, her motions, the tones of her voice, through all the past back to my first remembrance.  The places she inhabited, her opinions and her actions I commented on with a minuteness that allowed no detail to escape.  When my thoughts turned from her, it seemed as if she were newly lost in the vast and wandering Universe of the Dead, whence I had brought her.