It is Sunday evening. Miss Craven has been to church for the first time since her _bereavement_, as people call it. She has displayed her crape in all its crisp funeral newness before the eyes of the Plas Berwyn congregation. Also, she has been made the subject of conversation, over their early dinner, between the imbecile rector and his vinegar-faced, bob-curled wife; the latter remarking how unfortunately unbecoming black was to poor Miss Craven--really impossible to tell where her bonnet ended and her hair began; and how lucky it was for her that people did not wear mourning for as long a time as they used--three months being _ample_ nowadays, _ample_ for a brother! Esther has sat in their pew for the first time alone: she has looked at Jack's prayer-book, at his vacant corner under the dusty cobwebbed window, with eyes dryly stoic; she has walked firmly after service down the church-path, past a grassless hillock, where he who was her brother lies, dumbly submitting to the one terrific, changeless law of decay--the law that not one of us can face, as applying to ourselves, without our brains reeling at the horror of it. Oh! thrifty, harsh Nature! that, without a pang of relenting, unmixes again those cunningest compounds that we call our bodies--making the freed elements that formed them pass into new forms of life--makes us, who erewhile walked upright, godlike, fronting the sun, communing with the high stars--makes _us_, I say, creep many-legged in the beetle, crawl blind in the worm! It is evening now, and Esther sits, in her red armchair, beside the drawing-room fire, _alone_ again. The wind comes _banging_ every minute against the shuttered French window, as one that boisterously asks to be let in; the ivy leaves are dashed against the pane, as one that sighingly begs for admittance. Every now and then the young girl looks round timidly over her shoulder, in the chill expectation of seeing a death-pale spirit-face gazing at her from some corner of the room; every now and then she starts nervously, as a hot cinder drops from the grate, or as the small feet of some restless mouse make a hurry-skurrying noise behind the wainscot. As often as she can frame the smallest excuse, she rings the bell, in order to gather a little courage from the live human face, the live human voice, of the servant that answers it.