He stood and watched her weep for a long while, bending his eyes upon her from beneath their heavy, impending brows.  Heavy and impending they were still, but the vitality—­the sort of warm-hearted fierceness—­of his look was gone—­gone!  A young and bitter grief, like Cornelia’s, coming at a time of life when the feelings are so tender and their manifestation of pain so poignant—­is terrible enough to see, God knows! but the dry-eyed anguish of the old, of those who no longer possess the latent, indefinite, all-powerful encouragement of the future to support them—­who can breathe only the lifeless, cheerless air of the past—­grief with them does not convulse:  it saps, and chills, and crumbles away, without noise or any kind of demonstration.  The sight does not terrify or harrow us, but it makes us sick at heart and tinges our thoughts with a gloomy stain, which rather sinks out of sight than is worn away.

“Will you stay and watch with her, my dear?” said the old man, at last.  “She’ll sleep some hours, I think.  I’ll take a little sleep myself.  Call me when she wakes.”

So Cornelia was left alone to watch her sleeping and dying sister.  All the morning she sat by the bed, almost as motionless as Sophie herself.  Her mind was like a surf-wave that breaks upon the shore, slips back, regathers itself, and undulates on, to break again.  Begin where she would, she always ended on that bed, with its well-known face, set around with soft dark hair, always in the same position upon the pillow, which yielded beneath it in always the same creases and curves.  By-and-by, wherever she turned, still she saw that face, with the pillow rising around it; and when she shut her eyes, there it was, growing, in the blackness, clearer the more she tried to avert her mind.

It seemed to Cornelia—­for time enters involuntarily into our thoughts upon all subjects—­that the present order of things must have existed for a far longer period than a single night.  How could the events of a few hours wear such deep and uneffaceable channels in human lives?  But our souls have a chronology of their own, compared with the vividness and instantaneous workings of which, our bodies bear but a dull and lagging part.  Sorrow and joy, which act upon the soul immediately, must labor long ere they can write themselves legibly and permanently upon our faces.

Cornelia fell to wondering, too—­as most people under the pressure of grief are prone to do—­whether there were any sympathy or any connection between the world and the human beings who live upon it.  Her eyes wandered hither and thither about the room, and found it almost startling in its unaltered naturalness.  There was the same view of trees, road, and field, out of the window; and the same snow which had fallen before the tragedy, lay there now.  Even in Sophie’s face there was no adequate transformation.  Indeed, being somewhat reddened and swollen by the reaction from freezing, a stranger might have supposed that