I had sometimes observed with anxiety a slight shortness of breath, a gasping after unusual exercise, and called the attention of physicians to this state of things in my sister, who regarded it merely as a nervous symptom, and this was all to indicate that the fell destroyer was silently at work.  She had just laid a bunch of white roses on her toilet, and crossed the chamber for water to place them in, when she called my name in a strange, excited way, that brought me speedily to her side from the adjoining room.  She was lying white and speechless on her bed, beside which the crystal goblet lay in fragments.

The waters of her own existence had flowed forth with those prepared for her flowers, and before assistance could be summoned she expired peacefully in my arms, without a struggle.  She had inherited her mother’s malady.

The anguish and disappointment of the lover, and my own despair, may be better imagined than portrayed.  My baby died a few weeks later—­partly, I think, from the effect of my own condition on her frail organization, and the hope of years was blighted in this fragile blossom—­the first that had blessed our union.

The little Constance slumbered by Mabel’s side, and a slip from that bunch of white roses, the last my sister had gathered, shadows the marbles that guard both of those now-distant, yet not neglected graves.  Thus death at last entered our happy household!

A great shadow fell over me, which I vainly strove to dispel with all the effort of my reason and my will.  Physicians, remembering my mother’s inscrutable melancholy—­a part of that mysterious malady that consumed her life—­whispered their warnings in my husband’s ears, and he resolved, with that energy which belongs to men of his nature, to lay the axe at once to the root of this evil in the only way that presented itself to his mind—­as possible of accomplishment.

At first I resisted faintly the coincidence of his will, which he knew was sure to come sooner or later; and to the very last it was agony unspeakable to me, to think that my father’s house should pass into the hands of strangers, and that the place that knew me should know me no more!

Very resolutely and calmly did Wardour endure and stem my opposition.  Swift and strong as the current of my will flowed naturally, he was ever its master, as the stone dam can stay and lull the fiercest rivers.  He persisted, knowing well what was at stake, and to my surprise Dr. Pemberton and Mr. Gerald Stansbury cooperated with his decision.  Nor did Mr. Lodore oppose it, though losing thereby one of his most liberal parishioners.

A great struggle was going on in my heart just then—­that I think would have perished in darkness, had I not found myself free and emancipated from all fetters of custom and observance by our change of residence.

From the shallow streams of conventional Christianity, moving with tardy current, and full of shoals and sandbanks, I was drifting down, slowly but surely, with that great ocean of deep and unsounded religion, to which all profound natures, that have suffered, do, I believe—­if left to themselves—­inevitably tend.