The back of our carriage was drawn up, and I hung a pelisse before it, thus to curtain the beloved sufferer from the pelting sleet.  She leaned on my shoulder, growing every moment more languid and feeble; at first she replied to my words of cheer with affectionate thanks; but by degrees she sunk into silence; her head lay heavily upon me; I only knew that she lived by her irregular breathing and frequent sighs.  For a moment I resolved to stop, and, opposing the back of the cabriolet to the force of the tempest, to expect morning as well as I might.  But the wind was bleak and piercing, while the occasional shudderings of my poor Idris, and the intense cold I felt myself, demonstrated that this would be a dangerous experiment.  At length methought she slept—­fatal sleep, induced by frost:  at this moment I saw the heavy outline of a cottage traced on the dark horizon close to us:  “Dearest love,” I said, “support yourself but one moment, and we shall have shelter; let us stop here, that I may open the door of this blessed dwelling.”

As I spoke, my heart was transported, and my senses swam with excessive delight and thankfulness; I placed the head of Idris against the carriage, and, leaping out, scrambled through the snow to the cottage, whose door was open.  I had apparatus about me for procuring light, and that shewed me a comfortable room, with a pile of wood in one corner, and no appearance of disorder, except that, the door having been left partly open, the snow, drifting in, had blocked up the threshold.  I returned to the carriage, and the sudden change from light to darkness at first blinded me.  When I recovered my sight—­eternal God of this lawless world!  O supreme Death!  I will not disturb thy silent reign, or mar my tale with fruitless exclamations of horror—­I saw Idris, who had fallen from the seat to the bottom of the carriage; her head, its long hair pendent, with one arm, hung over the side.—­Struck by a spasm of horror, I lifted her up; her heart was pulseless, her faded lips unfanned by the slightest breath.

I carried her into the cottage; I placed her on the bed.  Lighting a fire, I chafed her stiffening limbs; for two long hours I sought to restore departed life; and, when hope was as dead as my beloved, I closed with trembling hands her glazed eyes.  I did not doubt what I should now do.  In the confusion attendant on my illness, the task of interring our darling Alfred had devolved on his grandmother, the Ex-Queen, and she, true to her ruling passion, had caused him to be carried to Windsor, and buried in the family vault, in St. George’s Chapel.  I must proceed to Windsor, to calm the anxiety of Clara, who would wait anxiously for us—­yet I would fain spare her the heart-breaking spectacle of Idris, brought in by me lifeless from the journey.  So first I would place my beloved beside her child in the vault, and then seek the poor children who would be expecting me.