Towards dawn of day, Emmeline, whose heavy eyes sleep had never visited, heard a bustle below; several doors were hastily opened and shut. In a little time, Fitzhenry (for she could never mistake _his_ step) passed hastily along the gallery to his own room, and closed the door immediately after him. Then there was again a dead silence. “It is all over,” thought Emmeline; “Reynolds is at peace: the only being in this house who loved me is gone!” A cold shiver crept over her; she buried her tear-bedewed face in her pillow, and thus lay for long immoveable, no conscious thought passing through her agitated mind. When her maid came to her in the morning, she informed her Reynolds had died about five o’clock; that Lord Fitzhenry had never left him; that he had supported him in his arms to the last, and, when all was over, appearing much affected, he had gone immediately to his own room, giving orders that no one was to go to him till he rung. Jenkins, unbidden, brought Emmeline her breakfast in her own apartment, although at Arlingford that was a meal at which she and Fitzhenry had always hitherto met. How painfully did she then feel the separation between them! Fitzhenry was in sorrow, and she, his wife, dared not go near him; even the servants seemed to dictate to her her conduct, and to be aware of her situation. As to her departure, she knew not what to determine. She had said she would go. Her husband had not opposed her declared intention, and she did not like again to be accused of caprice. Not feeling, however, that she could leave Arlingford without at least again seeing him, she put off her journey till the following day. To pass the slow unoccupied hours, Emmeline, knowing there was no chance of seeing Fitzhenry for some time, wandered out. The country was now in its first freshness of beauty—all smiled around her. Those rides and paths which, the summer before, she had first seen, with Fitzhenry at her side, were again clothed in the lovely green of spring. Often at those spots, connected in her mind with some circumstance, word, or even look of Fitzhenry, which a few months back had, although in delusion, made her heart sometimes beat with the flattering hope that she was not quite indifferent to him, poor Emmeline would remain fixed, quite unconscious of the time she thus passed in vague reverie. For, compared with what she had endured in London, there was a sort of pleasure in her present state of mind, raised and soothed as it had been, by the late pious duties in which she had been engaged, and softened by the charm of renovated nature. How often does some accidental sound or perfume, wafted to us on a spring breeze, startle the mind by confused recollections of hours gone by, and by undefinable sensations of mixed pain and pleasure!