“And we went on--how, I dare not try to think; yet we did toil up yonder hills, thou wailing on her bosom, and I carrying ye both in my arms--a dreadful journey! God save thee, Edith, from ever such agony as thou hadst an unconscious part in then! “We reached our shelter at last, when the gloom of night was on the hills, the bleak, chill gloom of night; and then, Edith, I tried to hope. God help me! I looked upon her face as she lay yonder, and tried to hope. But she had only come there in time to die! Edith--Edith! it was thus thy mother died!” He could not go on; the strong man’s voice was choked--his breast heaved convulsively, and again he hid his face in his hands. Edith was weeping silently by his side; the time passed by unnoted; he knew not how it went, until he looked up again when the twilight shadows were stealing through the room, and saw Sir Philip Dacre standing by his daughter’s side. The young man was very grave. He looked wistfully into the Puritan’s face, “She is dead.” Yes, in bitterer agony than that which carried the gentle Edith Dacre away from sin and oppression, into the holy peace of heaven--in deadly remorse and dreary hopelessness, rejecting the name of Him whose mercy she had spurned, and whose servants she had wronged, the haughty spirit of the Lady of Thornleigh had gone forth unrepentant and defiant to its doom. The Puritan did not speak. “The Lord pardon her,” said Edith; then she paused in painful haste: it was too late now to pray that prayer. And so in the midst of panic and calamity, when solemn funeral honors could be paid to none, however noble, her son and the husband of her murdered kinswoman the sole mourners, they laid the Lady Dacre in an uncommemorated grave. The pestilence ebbed and flowed again--in its capricious floods and falls cheating the sick hearts that watched its sinking with so tremulous a hope; and though it grew feeble with the feeble year, it still held its place until its close, and only went fully out at last when the wholesome cold of the mid-winter began to be touched by the breath of another spring. But in December, the stricken who had been counted by thousands once, were reckoned in scanty hundreds only. The terror was gone, the atmosphere was cleared. Where men had been wont, under the pressure of this calamity, to stay upon the desolate streets and confess their sins before God aloud, men staid now in joyful wonder to give Him thanks who had spared them. But grim want and poverty were reigning supreme over those hollow-eyed, pale-faced citizens of the meaner sort whom the plague had spared, and there was yet abundant room for the labors of charity and kindness, and many calls for such--calls which were not unanswered. Edith Field, with Mercy Rogers in attendance on her, was passing through Aldgate one chill December day, on her usual work of mercy. “Mistress Edith,” said a voice behind them, “tarry, and say farewell to an ancient friend.”