And the channel being once opened, the seal of silence and reserve taken off, her passion of feeling burst forth into wild weeping that shook her from head to foot.  Involuntarily she took hold of the bedpost to stay herself, and clung to it, bending her head there like a broken reed.

She felt even at the time, and remembered better afterwards, how gently and kindly she was drawn away from there and taken back into the other room and made to sit down.  She could do nothing at the moment but yield to the tempest of feeling, in which it seemed as if every wind of heaven shook her by turns.  When at last it had passed over, the violence of it, and she took command of herself again, it was even then with a very sobered and sad mind.  As if, she thought afterwards, as if that storm had been, like some storms in the natural world, the forerunner and usher of a permanent change of weather.  She looked up at Winthrop, when she was quieted and he brought her a glass of water, not like the person that had looked at him when she first came in.  He waited till she had drunk the water and was to appearance quite mistress of herself again.

“You must not go yet,” he said, as she was making some movement towards it; —­ “you are cold.  You must wait till you are warmed.”

He mended the fire and placed a chair for her, and handed her to it.  Elizabeth did as she was bade, like a child; and sat there before the fire a little while, unable to keep quiet tears from coming and coming again.

“I don’t know what you must think of me, Mr. Winthrop,” she said at last, when she was about ready to go.  “I could not help myself. —­ I have never seen death before.”

“You must see it again, Miss Elizabeth; —­ you must meet it face to face.”

She looked up at him as he said it, with eager eyes, from which tears ran yet, and that were very expressive in the intensity of their gaze.  His were not less intent, but as gentle and calm as hers were troubled.

“Are you ready?” he added.

She shook her head, still looking at him, and her lips formed that voiceless ‘no.’  She never forgot the face with which he turned away, —­ the face of grave gentleness, of sweet gravity, —­ all the volume of reproof, of counsel, of truth, that was in that look.  But it was truth that, as it was known to him, he seemed to assume to be known to her; he did not open his lips.

Elizabeth rose; she must go; she would have given a world to have him say something more.  But he stood and saw her put on her gloves and arrange her cloak for going out, and he said nothing.  Elizabeth longed to ask him the question, “What must I do?” —­ she longed and almost lingered to ask it; —­ but something, she did not know what, stopped her and choked her, and she did not ask it.  He saw her down to the street, in silence on both sides, and they parted there, with a single grasp of the hand. That said something again; and Elizabeth cried all the way home, and was well nigh sick by the time she got there.