“My poor Lilias!” said the kind Mossgray--he could say nothing more. And then, in her slow, painful way, she began to speak. It was so great a grief to hear every distinct convulsive word as she uttered it, that the old man could hardly gather their import while he listened. She did not look at him now; her eyes were wandering through the vacant room, opened widely, as though she dared not cast down their lids, and the slow tide of her speech--those single words which came from her lips, like so many life-drops from a heart, pained to the utmost the gentle soul of Adam Graeme. She wanted to tell him that now she was alone--that she had only one wish now, separate from Mossgray, and that was to see his mother. “My poor child,” said the old man, as Lilias came to this point, and laboured with her convulsed utterance to articulate the words: “We will speak of this another time when we _can_ speak of it; but now you must rest.” And when he spoke of rest she laid down her head upon her hands, and her agony returned upon her. “Lilias,” said the old man, “what if he had changed?--what if you had learned that he was not what you believed him to be? Rather thank God that bravely in honour and faith, he has been taken home; in the odour and grace of youth, before evil days or stains came upon him. Lilias, there are sorrows harder than yours--you shall find again him whom you have lost. There are those who have lost, and shall find never more, because they are parted not by this faithful and pure death, but by the dark barriers of sin and change. Lilias, my good child!” She did not hear him; the words fell on her ear indefinite as the sound of the stream without, for words do not bring comfort to the desolate heart of grief when the blow has fallen newly. And then she went away again slowly and painfully to her own darkened room. Halbert met her on the stair but she did not speak to him, and her wan face, and deep mourning dress, awed the light-hearted Halbert into reverential silence. He was not light-hearted then--he almost felt that his own happiness was selfish in the presence of such grief. And the old man paced heavily his large, low, study-room, thinking with tender compassion of his ward, the orphan, and the widowed. It brought back the days of his own pained and struggling youth, and he remembered how gentle to him would have been this hand of death instead of the more cruel stroke which laid his early dreams in the dust. He thought of Lucy Murray and of her tears--tears which fell singly in their force and bitterness like the words of Lilias; and he thanked God that rather thus the stroke had fallen upon his child. She was now doubly his child--left to him alone for care and succour--set apart from all the world.