One gray February afternoon, when the rain was falling steadily, Jean felt unusually depressed and weary.  An apprehension of some unhappiness made her sad, and she could not sew for the tears that would dim her eyes.  Suddenly the door opened and Gavin’s sister Mary entered.  Jean did not know her very well, and she did not like her at all, and she wondered what she had come to tell her.

“I am going to New York on Saturday, Jean,” she said, “and I thought Gavin would like to know how you looked and felt these days.”

Jean flushed indignantly.  “You can see how I look easy enough, Mary Burns,” she answered; “but as to how I feel, that is a thing I keep to myself these days.”

“Gavin has furnished a pretty house at the long last, and I am to be the mistress of it.  You will have heard, doubtless, that the school where I taught so long has been broken up, and so I was on the world, as one may say, and Gavin could not bear that.  He is a good man, is Gavin, and I’m thinking I shall have a happy time with him in America.”

“I hope you will, Mary.  Give him a kind wish from me; and I will bid you ‘good bye’ now, if you please, seeing that I have more sewing to do to-night than I can well manage.”

This event wounded Jean sorely.  She felt sure Mary had only called for an unkind purpose, and that she would cruelly misrepresent her appearance and condition to Gavin.  And no woman likes even a lost lover to think scornfully of her.  But she brought her sewing beside her mother and talked the affair over with her, and so, at the end of the evening, went to bed resigned, and even cheerful.  Never had they spent a more confidential, loving night together, and this fact was destined to be a comfort to Jean during all the rest of her life.  For in the morning she noticed a singular look on her mother’s face and at noon she found her in her chair fast in that sleep which knows no wakening in this world.

It was a blow which put all other considerations far out of Jean’s mind.  She mourned with a passionate sorrow her loss, and though Uncle David came at once to assist her in the necessary arrangements, she suffered no hand but her own to do the last kind offices for her dear dead.  And oh! how empty and lonely was now the little cottage, while the swift return to all the ordinary duties of life seemed such a cruel effacement.  Uncle David watched her silently, but on the evening of the third day after the funeral he said, kindly: 

“Dry your eyes, Jean.  There is naething to weep for.  Your mother is far beyond tears.”

“I cannot bear to forget her a minute, uncle, yet folks go and come and never name her; and it is not a week since she had a word and a smile for everybody.”

    “Death is forgetfulness, Jean;
                ... ’one lonely way
    We go:  and is she gone? 
    Is all our best friends say.’

“You must come home with me now, Jean.  I canna be what your mother has been to you, but I’ll do the best I can for you, lassie.  Sell these bit sticks o’ furniture and shut the door on the empty house and begin a new life.  You’ve had sorrow about a lad; let him go.  All o’ the past worth your keeping you can save in your memory.”