She always kept far enough away to be out of hearing when we whispered to each other.  We rarely detected her even in looking at us.  She had a way of sitting for hours together in the same part of the room, without ever changing her position, without occupation of any kind, without uttering a word, or breathing a sigh.  I soon discovered that she was not lost in thought, at these periods (as I had at first supposed):  but lost in a strange lethargy of body and mind; a comfortless, waking trance, into which she fell from sheer physical weakness—­it was like the vacancy and feebleness of a first convalescence, after a long illness.  She never changed:  never looked better, never worse.  I often spoke to her:  I tried hard to show my sympathy, and win her confidence and friendship.  The poor lady was always thankful, always spoke to me gratefully and kindly, but very briefly.  She never told me what were her sufferings or her sorrows.  The story of that lonely, lingering life was an impenetrable mystery for her own family—­for her husband and her daughter, as well as for me.  It was a secret between her and God.

With Mrs. Sherwin as the guardian to watch over Margaret, it may easily be imagined that I felt none of the heavier oppressions of restraint.  Her presence, as the third person appointed to remain with us, was not enough to repress the little endearments to which each evening’s lesson gave rise; but was just sufficiently perceptible to invest them with the character of stolen endearments, and to make them all the more precious on that very account.  Mrs. Sherwin never knew, I never thoroughly knew myself till later, how much of the secret of my patience under my year’s probation lay in her conduct, while she was sitting in the room with Margaret and me.

In this solitude where I now write—­in the change of life and of all life’s hopes and enjoyments which has come over me—­when I look back to those evenings at North Villa, I shudder as I look.  At this moment, I see the room again—­as in a dream—­with the little round table, the reading lamp, and the open books.  Margaret and I are sitting together:  her hand is in mine; my heart is with hers.  Love, and Youth, and Beauty—­the mortal Trinity of this world’s worship—­are there, in that quiet softly-lit room; but not alone.  Away in the dim light behind, is a solitary figure, ever mournful and ever still.  It is a woman’s form; but how wasted and how weak!—­a woman’s face; but how ghastly and changeless, with those eyes that are vacant, those lips that are motionless, those cheeks that the blood never tinges, that the freshness of health and happiness shall never visit again!  Woeful, warning figure of dumb sorrow and patient pain, to fill the background of a picture of Love, and Beauty, and Youth!

I am straying from my task.  Let me return to my narrative:  its course begins to darken before me apace, while I now write.