They stood there in silence, nurse supporting Lady Desmond, who leant against her, her bonnet thrown aside, her luxuriant black hair drawn back from her lofty forehead, her large dark eyes dilated, as if her soul gazed through them far away. Kate, a smile struggling through the tears streaming from hers, and one hand slightly raised towards Heaven. The three figures symbolising well, homely humanity, with its quiet necessary fortitude. Intellect and refinement, with their larger capacity, for joy or for suffering, and faith, so often almost extinguished, amid sorrow and doubt, yet still preserving a ray of everlasting hope. But Lady Desmond was overpowered by the fatigue of a rapid and frequently obstructed journey, performed in a fever of anxiety; and Kate's attention was beneficially attracted from her all engrossing subject of thought to her cousin's evident exhaustion. She wished much to remove Kate at once from what she considered her wretched lodging, to her hotel, but this Kate resolutely refused to comply with. "It is the last sad duty I can pay him," she said, "not to quit his remains until they are carried to their last home!" Lady Desmond, therefore, determined to stay with her; and Mrs. Crook's establishment were put to their wits' end by the mingled excitement of a death, and a ladyship in a carriage-and-four. Recovered from her fatigue, by a night's rest, Lady Desmond devoted herself to the care of her young cousin, with all the eagerness of a passionate nature, remorseful for the past; but though she hushed Kate to sleep each night in her arms, she performed every task that could by possibility devolve on Miss Vernon, such as attending to the details of the funeral, &c., with a diligence and tact that spared Kate many a pang; it was the latter who, amid her own absorbing grief, found time and gentle wisdom, wherewith to calm the sudden bursts of sorrow which often welled up from the heart of that proud, but generous and impulsive woman, who ever rushing into extremes, found food for self-reproach in every little incident which either nurse or Kate betrayed, of their life, for the last year. "It was so obstinate, so unkindly obstinate of you not to join me at Florence; God only knows how much it might have spared; yet that was no excuse for my selfish negligence; though, Kate, I had powerful inducements not to return to England, I will--perhaps I may yet tell you them, and you will then understand me." The day after the funeral, that renewal of death and sorrow, Kate readily acceded to her cousin's wish to leave the spot, no longer sanctified by the inanimate presence of him they had lost. And it was with a dull feeling of weariness, as if even the capacity of suffering had been worn out, that she threw herself into the carriage that was to take her away from the scene of her late bereavement. All was now over, nothing more to be done; and all she longed for was silence, solitude, and sleep.