But there were bitterer tears to be shed, and deeper griefs to be borne than Grace Lovering had yet known; six months after her marriage she followed her young husband to the grave, and there was none on earth that could sustain or uphold her in that day of terrible visitation. Voices and forms with which she was scarcely familiar came to comfort her, but the friend whose companionship would have made any place in the wide world a pleasant home for her, was dead; and the bereaved woman longed to return once again to her early home—the village where all her early life was passed—to bury her husband and lover beside her parents, under the willow-tree in the old burial-ground, and then to mourn in quietness, and alone, away from the scenes of the bustling, noisy town. And all her desires were speedily complied with—her old guardian and uncle from the little village came to her to assist, and conduct her back to Romulus; and before the year was passed, Grace was again at home in the old house where she was born, and in the grave-yard near by, on which she could daily, hourly look, her husband slept. Kindly and tenderly the old neighbors welcomed back the mourner to their midst; and there, where in her childish heart love had first awakened, there, where in later years she had watched in agony the dear ones of the household “passing away” silently into the “silent land;” there, in the old dwelling, which, during the few past years had stood tenantless, and looking so broken-hearted; there, in her early womanhood, Grace Lovering, the desolate and stricken, came back to make it her abiding-place, her lonely _home_. She felt that to her a cold twilight of existence only was remaining, that the sunshine which rests so richly and revivingly on the young and the beloved, would be henceforth faint and weak as her own heart. But it was not wholly so, time the great soother, as well as destroyer and chastener, took the sting and the poignancy from her grief, and, like the dove with its olive branch, there spread through her soul that trust in Heaven’s infinite goodness, that makes the wilderness even to blossom. Placed far above the reach of poverty, the miseries and cares of want did not mingle their bitterness with her heart-sorrow. And in all, save those few natural but dread experiences, Grace bade fair to be a “babe at seventy,” in that unwelcome wisdom which continued misfortunes only can impart.