The aspect of the house could not have been more funereal had half the population succumbed. Already, by some wonderful effort of millinery, the maids as well as their mistress had got their black gowns. Mrs. Meredith herself sat in the drawing-room, crape from head to foot, in all the crispness of a fresh widow’s cap. Never was black so black, or white so white. She had an innocent satisfaction in heaping up this kind of agony. Already a design drawn by Oswald was in the hands of the goldsmith for a locket to hold her husband’s hair. She would not bate a jot of anything that the most bereaved mourner could do to show her ‘respect.’ Even the tears were ready, and they were sincere tears. A pang of compunction, a pang of regret, of remorseful pity and tenderness, melted her heart, and there was a certain pleasure of melancholy in all this which made it spontaneous. It was the very luxury of sentiment, to be able to feel your heart untouched underneath, and yet to be so deeply, unfeignedly sorry, to be so true a mourner at so little real cost. Mrs. Meredith held out her hand to her visitor as he came in--he was the only one whom she had received. ‘This is kind,’ she said--‘very kind. As you were always such a good friend to us, I could not say no to you.’ ‘I was very sorry,’ he said; as indeed what else was there to say? ‘Oh, yes, I knew you would feel for us. It was so sudden--quite well when the last mail came in, and this one to bring such news! You scarcely knew him; and, oh, I feel it so much now, that none of my friends, that not even the boys knew him as they ought to have known him. It seems as if it must have been my fault.’ ‘_That_ it could never have been. You must not reproach yourself; though one always does, however the loss happens,’ he said, in a low and sorrowful tone. He was thinking of his wife, for whom he had mourned with the intensity of despair, but the same words answered both cases. He stood as he had done the last time he was there, not looking at her in her panoply of mourning, but looking dreamily into the fire. And she cried a little, with a childish sob in her throat. The grief was perfectly real, childlike, and innocent. He was much more affected by the recollection of that last meeting at which he had taken leave of her than she was--he remembered it better. The new incident even kept her from seeing anything more than the most ordinary every-day fact, one friend coming to see another, in his return. ‘I suppose you have no details?’ ‘Not one. We cannot hear till the next mail. It will be some comfort to have particulars. Poor John! he was always so strong, one never had any fear. I was the one that could not stand the climate; and yet I am left and he is taken!’ ‘But you have not been exposed to the climate,’ said Mr. Beresford. She was not wise in these expressions of her personal grief, though her friends always thought her so wise in her sympathy. She resumed softly: