This kindness and affection fairly overcame Lucy, who sat down on a sofa, and wept bitterly.  Lady Gourlay herself was deeply affected for some minutes, but, at length, resuming composure, she sat beside Lucy, and, taking her hand, said:  “I can understand, my dear child, the nature of your grief; but be comforted.  Your heart, which was burdened, will soon become lighter, and better spirits will return; so, I trust, will better times.  It is not from the transient and unsteady, and too often painful, incidents of life, that we should attempt to draw consolation, but from a fixed and firm confidence in the unchangeable purposes of God.”

“I wish, dear Lady Gourlay—­dear aunt—­”

“Yes, that is better, my love.”

“I wish I had known you before; of late I have been alone—­with none to advise or guide me; for, she, whose affectionate heart, whose tender look, and whose gentle monition, were ever with me—­she—­alas, my dear aunt, how few know what the bitterness is—­when forced to struggle against strong but misguided wills, whether of our own or others’; to feel that we are without a mother—­that that gentle voice is silent forever; that that well in the desert of life—­a mother’s heart—­is forever closed to us; that that protecting angel of our steps is departed from us—­never, never to return.”

As she uttered these words in deep grief, it might have been observed, that Lady Gourlay shed some quiet but apparently bitter tears.  It is impossible for us to enter into the heart, or its reflections; but it is not, we think, unreasonable to suppose that while Lucy dwelt so feelingly upon the loss of her mother, the other may have been thinking upon that of her child.

“My dear girl,” she exclaimed, “let the affectionate compact which I have just proposed be ratified between us.  My heart, at all events, has already ratified it.  I shall be as a mother to you, and you shall be to me as a daughter.”

“I know not, my dear aunt,” replied Lucy, “whether to consider you more affectionate than generous.  How few of our sex, after—­after—­that is, considering the enmities—­in fact, how a relative, placed as you unhappily are, would take me to her heart as you have done.”

“Perhaps, my child, I were incapable of it, if that heart had never been touched and softened by affliction.  As it is, Lucy, let me say to you, as one who probably knows the world better, do not look, as most young persons like you do, upon the trials you are at present forced to suffer, as if they were the sharpest and heaviest in the world.  Time, my love, and perhaps other trials of a still severer character, may one day teach you to think that your grief and impatience were out of proportion to what you then underwent.  May He who afflicts his people for their good, prevent that this ever should be so in your case; but, even if it should, remember that God loveth whom he chasteneth.  And above all things, my dear child, never, never, never despair in his providence.  Dry your eyes, my love,” she added, with a smile of affection and encouragement, that Lucy felt to be contagious by its cheering influence upon her; “dry your tears, and turn round to the light until I contemplate more clearly and distinctly that beauty of which I have heard so much.”