Then came the day for news--the dread day, when all secret hopes which might be lurking in our hearts were to receive confirmation or destruction, the last being so very much the most probable. I felt assured that if the news was favorable, Derwent would return that day, and waited with a beating heart for the dispatch, which I knew he would not delay a moment in sending me. The news came--alas! such unhappy no-news! The same perplexing, murderous information, simply repeated without a single clue to the mistake, whatever it was. I sank down in my chair, with an overpowering sickness at my heart while I read--sickness of depressed hope, of disappointment of a conviction and certainty which crushed me. The repetition somehow weighed heavily with my imagination. I could no longer either deny or doubt the truth of it. It was all over. There was no more Bertie Nugent of Estcourt now to maintain the name of my fathers; so many hopes and dreams were ended, and such a noble, fresh young life, full of all good and generous impulses, was finished for ever. “I fear--I fear, Derwie, my darling--I fear it must be true,” said I. “But what did he do? Bertie did not die for nothing, mamma--is it not in the paper what he _did_?” cried Derwie. If it had been, perhaps one could have borne it better. If he had died relieving a distressed garrison, or freeing a band of agonized fugitives, and we had known that he did so, perhaps--perhaps--it might have been easier to bear. I sat down listlessly in the great window of the breakfast-room. Something of the maze of grief came over me. If I had seen him coming through the avenue yonder, crossing the lawn, approaching to me with his pleasant smile, I should not have wondered. Death had separated Bertie from the limits of place and country--he was mysteriously near, though what remained of him might be thousands of miles away. Thus I sat languidly looking out, and saying over in my heart those verses which everybody must remember who has ever been in great trouble--those verses of _In Memoriam_, in which the poet sees the ship come home with its solemn, silent passenger, and yet feels that if along with the other travellers he saw the dead man step forth-- “And strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home;-- “And I should tell him all my pain, And how my life had drooped of late, And he should sorrow o’er my state, And marvel what possessed my brain; “And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame, But found him all in all the same, I should not feel it to be strange.”