CHAPTER TWENTY THREE. MOODS OF THE MIND. Hester's sleeping as well as waking thoughts were this night full of solicitude as to her feelings and conduct towards her sister. A thousand times before the morning she had said to herself, in dreams and in meditation, that she had failed in this relation--the oldest, and, till of late, the dearest. She shuddered to think how nearly she had lost Margaret; and to imagine what her state of mind would have been, if her sister had now been beyond the reach of the voice, the eye, the hand, which she was resolved should henceforth dispense to her nothing but the love and the benefits she deserved. She reflected that to few was granted such a warning of the death of beloved ones: to few was it permitted to feel, while it was yet not too late, the agony of remorse for pain inflicted, for gratifications withheld; for selfish neglect, for insufficient love. She remembered vividly what her emotions had been as a child, on finding her canary dead in its cage;--how she had wept all day, not so much for its loss as from the recollection of the many times when she had failed to cheer it with sugar, and groundsel, and play, and of the number of hours when she had needlessly covered up its cage in impatience at its song, shutting out its sunshine, and changing the brightest seasons of its little life into dull night. If it had been thus with her sister! Many a hasty word, many an unjust thought, came back now to wring her heart, when she imagined Margaret sinking in the water,--the soft breathing on which our life so marvellously hangs, stopped without struggle or cry. How near--how very near, had Death, in his hovering, stooped towards their home! How strange, while treading thus precariously the film which covers the abyss into which all must some day drop, and which may crack under the feet of any one at any hour,--how strange to be engrossed with petty jealousies, with selfish cares, and to be unmindful of the great interests of existence, the exercises of mutual love and trust! Thank God! it was not too late. Margaret lived to be cherished, to be consoled for her private griefs, as far as consolation might be possible; to have her innocent affections redeemed from the waste to which they now seemed doomed,--gathered gradually up again, and knit into the interests of the home life in which she was externally bearing her part. Full of these thoughts, and forgetting how often her best feelings had melted away beneath the transient heats kindled by the little provocations of daily life, Hester now believed that Margaret would never have to suffer from her more,--that their love would be henceforth like that of angels,--like that which it would have been if Margaret had really died yesterday. It was yet early, when, in the full enjoyment of these undoubting thoughts, Hester stood by her sister's bedside.