A portrait of my mother hung over the fireplace:  my eyes turned towards it, and for the first time I came to a long pause.  The picture had an influence that quieted me; but what influence I hardly knew.  Perhaps it led my spirit up to the spirit that had gone from us—­perhaps those secret voices from the unknown world, which only the soul can listen to, were loosed at that moment, and spoke within me.  While I sat looking up at the portrait, I grew strangely and suddenly calm before it.  My memory flew back to a long illness that I had suffered from, as a child, when my little cradle-couch was placed by my mother’s bedside, and she used to sit by me in the dull evenings and hush me to sleep.  The remembrance of this brought with it a dread imagining that she might now be hushing my spirit, from her place among the angels of God.  A stillness and awe crept over me; and I hid my face in my hands.

The striking of the hour from a clock in the room, startled me back to the outer world.  I left the house and went at once to North Villa.

Margaret and her father and mother were in the drawing-room when I entered it.  I saw immediately that neither of the two latter had passed the morning calmly.  The impending event of the day had exercised its agitating influence over them, as well as over me.  Mrs. Sherwin’s face was pale to her very lips:  not a word escaped her.  Mr. Sherwin endeavoured to assume the self-possession which he was evidently far from feeling, by walking briskly up and down the room, and talking incessantly—­asking the most common-place questions, and making the most common-place jokes.  Margaret, to my surprise, showed fewer symptoms of agitation than either of her parents.  Except when the colour came and went occasionally on her cheek, I could detect no outward evidences of emotion in her at all.

The church was near at hand.  As we proceeded to it, the rain fell heavily, and the mist of the morning was thickening to a fog.  We had to wait in the vestry for the officiating clergyman.  All the gloom and dampness of the day seemed to be collected in this room—­a dark, cold, melancholy place, with one window which opened on a burial-ground steaming in the wet.  The rain pattered monotonously on the pavement outside.  While Mr. Sherwin exchanged remarks on the weather with the clerk, (a tall, lean man, arrayed in a black gown), I sat silent, near Mrs. Sherwin and Margaret, looking with mechanical attention at the white surplices which hung before me in a half-opened cupboard—­at the bottle of water and tumbler, and the long-shaped books, bound in brown leather, which were on the table.  I was incapable of speaking—­incapable even of thinking—­during that interval of expectation.