She never spoke again, and when the early summer morning looked into the room, there was only a still, motionless figure on the bed, with pale hands folded upon the bosom, and the pillow strewn with flowers, which Rosamond had put there. Rosamond thought of everything; first of the dead, then of the stern judge, who broke down entirely by the side of his lost Mary, and then of Everard, who seemed like one stunned by a heavy blow. With the constantly increasing pain in his head, blinding him even more than the tears he shed, he wrote to Josephine: “Oh, Josey, you will be sorry for me when I tell you mother is dead. She died this morning at three o’clock, and I am heart-broken. She was all the world to me. What shall I do without my mother?” He posted the letter himself, and then kept his room, and for the most part his bed, until the day of the funeral, when, hardly knowing what he was doing, or realizing what was passing around him, he stood by his mother’s grave, saw the coffin lowered into it, heard the earth rattling down upon it, and had a strange sensation of wonder as to whom they were burying, and who he was himself. That puzzled him the most, except, indeed, the question as to where the son was, the young man from Amherst College, who drove such fast horses, and smoked so many cigars, and sometimes bet at cards. “He ought to be here seeing to this,” he thought; and then, as a twinge of pain shot through his temple, he moaned faintly, and went back to the carriage, in which he was driven rapidly home. There was a letter from Josephine in his room, which had come while he was at his mother’s grave. He recognized the handwriting at once, and with a feeling as if something were clutching his throat and impeding his breath, he took it up, and opening it, read his first letter from his wife. CHAPTER VII. JOSEPHINE. Immediately after Everard’s departure she wrote to the postmaster at Clarence, making inquiries for Doctor Matthewson, and in due time received an answer addressed to the fictitious name which she had given. There had been a clergyman in town by that name, the postmaster wrote, but he had been dismissed for various misdemeanors. However, a marriage performed by him, with the knowledge and consent of the parties, would undoubtedly be binding on such parties. Latterly he had taken to the study of medicine, and assumed the title of “Doctor.”