Some changes had taken place at the Hall within the last year, which had glided away with the swiftness of a shadow. In the January immediately preceding the season of which we are now writing, Mistress Alice had been summoned by that call, which, sooner or later, all must obey, and laid in a peaceful grave:--the snows that fell upon it were not more pure and spotless than had been her kind and innocent life, and her dissolution had been as gentle and as soft as their quick and silent melting. The family and household were still in their mourning for her; and had any stranger gazed upon Katharine Heywood, as in her sad robes of black she paced the terrace alone with slow and thoughtful steps, he would have wept for sympathy, and deemed her one of those silent mourners for the dead who refuse to be comforted, and cherish the sweet memory of a vanished image; but it was far otherwise,--her griefs were those of doubt and apprehension about the living. If ever a glance of the mind looked after the departed Alice, it did so with affection and complacency; with a calm joy that she was taken from the evil to come, and with an envy of her quiet tomb. But such movements of impatience at the difficulties of her path and the dreariness of that waste which lay before her in her appointed pilgrimage were never of any long continuance. She knew them to be wicked, and she knew them to be vain: she wore divine and secret armour, and she neither fled nor fainted in her hours of trial. The occasional, though less frequent, visits of George Juxon were a great relief to her,--and Jane Lambert continued to be her constant friend and beloved companion. Over the character of Jane there had come a change, which, though at times it was viewed with serious anxiety by Katharine, did upon the whole suit far better with those habits of her own soul which care had begotten. Jane Lambert’s eyes, which were used to be lighted up with bright and joyous expression, and a certain lively and winning archness, did now often fill with unbidden tears, or were fixed gravely upon vacancy. One day, as the friends were walking together in a silent mood, the hand of Katharine resting gently upon the shoulder of Jane, and their steps slow as those of vestals in their groves, Juxon came suddenly upon them in their path; and so deep was the abstraction of both, that he was not seen of either till they met closely. “I am sorry,” he observed, “to break the spell by which you are both bound, but I could not turn back, for I have business with Sir Oliver; however, it was to all seeming a spell so black and melancholy that perhaps it is better broken.”