Poor, little, soft, tender-hearted woman! There was no passion in her. She was in love with all her heart, but it was affectionately, not passionately, or else she never could have opened that desk. She took out the flower, and cried, and looked at it; then, with a hasty impulse, put it softly on the fire, and watched it blaze into sudden ashes, and cried again, and felt guilty to her heart. “I was such a child,” she said to herself in her tears, and took a kind of melancholy comfort from thinking how young she had been when she was first a bride. Then she looked at her own drawing, which was not the least like him, and thought with a compunction of her Harry. Poor Harry! All this bright house, all these dear children, were his as well as hers; but he was put away in the family vault, poor fellow, and nothing was henceforward to belong to him in this living world—not even the name he had given her, not her thoughts, not any of her heart. She cried over that too like the rest. She put up the ring in a little parcel for Loo—she laid aside the portrait for little Harry. She tried to indemnify him by making over all those little mementoes, which it troubled her to look at, to his children. Then she took up the bundle of yellow letters and timidly opened one of them, and read a few sentences. There she read of the young love that was never to die, never to know change. Poor Mary put them away again with a sob almost of terror, and hastily locked up the desk, and resolved to put it away somewhere out of sight. She could not examine any further into those “treasures” which had become ghosts. She drew her chair to the fire, and shivered in her thoughts. She was a simple-minded woman, not wise, but moved by every wind of feeling. It came to her mind just then to recollect how, in her first widowhood, she had taken comfort from the thought that Harry was near and saw her tears for him, and knew how faithful her poor heart was. Now that thought was too much for Mary’s strength. She gave a cry of helpless terror when it occurred to her. Alas, for that immortality of union which comforts the heart of grief! What if Harry met her at the very gates of heaven when she got there, and claimed her, she who was going to be another man’s bride? Sitting alone in the night, with all the household asleep, and such thoughts for companions, it was not wonderful if a panic seized upon Mrs Clifford’s heart. Poor Harry, who had loved her so well, appeared like a pursuing spectre to the soft little woman. If it was true that she belonged to him for ever and ever, how could she dare to love Tom Summerhayes? and if she did not belong to him for ever and ever—he who had loved her to the end, and had never done anything to forfeit her affection—what was the hereafter, the heaven where love, it appeared, could not be immortal? These fancies wrung poor Mary’s heart. She did not know any answer to make to them. The question put by the Sadducees nohow answered her case.