The kind minister soothed the poor old soul with those gentle, quieting tones which had carried peace and comfort to so many chambers of sickness and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened by the trials laid upon them.

Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and proceeded to tell her story.  She told it in the low half-whisper which is the natural voice of lips oppressed wish grief and fears; with quick glances around the apartment from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the dim portraits on the walls and the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her words.

It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers of stories made out of authors’ brains.  Yet its main character can be imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to give all its details.

She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,—­she being then a middle-aged woman.  The heir and hope of a family which had been narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been surrounded with every care and trained by the best education he could have in New England.  He had left college, and was studying the profession which gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he fell in love with a young girl left in the world almost alone, as he was.  The old woman told the story of his young love and his joyous bridal with a tenderness which had something more, even, than her family sympathies to account for it.  Had she not hanging over her bed a paper-cutting of a profile,—­jet black, but not blacker than the face it represented—­of one who would have been her own husband in the small years of this century, if the vessel in which he went to sea, like Jamie in the ballad, had not sailed away and never come back to land?  Had she not her bits of furniture stowed away which had been got ready for her own wedding,—­two rocking-chairs, one worn with long use, one kept for him so long that it had grown a superstition with her never to sit in it,—­and might he not come back yet, after all?  Had she not her chest of linen ready for her humble house-keeping with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of neatly folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against her black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in “the presence”?

All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet dwelling upon every incident with a loving pleasure.  How happy this young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they had formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young and fresh and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early summer when they walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in the garden,—­she told of this as loath to leave it and come to the woe that lay beneath.