“Whenever I can be useful, sir.”

“For instance, the night before I am married!  I am sure I shall not be able to sleep.  Will you promise to sit up with me to bear me company?  To you I can talk of my lovely one:  for now you have seen her and know her.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s a rare one, is she not, Jane?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A strapper —­ a real strapper, Jane:  big, brown, and buxom; with hair just such as the ladies of Carthage must have had.  Bless me! there’s Dent and Lynn in the stables!  Go in by the shrubbery, through that wicket.”

As I went one way, he went another, and I heard him in the yard, saying cheerfully —

“Mason got the start of you all this morning; he was gone before sunrise:  I rose at four to see him off.”

CHAPTER XXI

Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.  I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own.  Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension.  And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man.

When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child; and that to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either to one’s self or one’s kin.  The saying might have worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately followed which served indelibly to fix it there.  The next day Bessie was sent for home to the deathbed of her little sister.

Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water.  It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next:  now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.

I did not like this iteration of one idea —­ this strange recurrence of one image, and I grew nervous as bedtime approached and the hour of the vision drew near.  It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had been roused on that moonlight night when I heard the cry; and it was on the afternoon of the day following I was summoned downstairs by a message that some one wanted me in Mrs. Fairfax’s room.  On repairing thither, I found a man waiting for me, having the appearance of a gentleman’s servant:  he was dressed in deep mourning, and the hat he held in his hand was surrounded with a crape band.