After we had dined, I went with her, glad to be kept in any way from my own sole company, to unpack our trunk upstairs. I took out the things I had been working at, and my materials, and when she was ready to go with me, I carried them down stairs. I would not go without Alice. I made her sit by me, and take her own work, and be constantly at my side. By this time we had drawn a little table to the window for our sewing-things, and Alice sat opposite to me in a hard mahogany arm-chair, while I, half reclining on my sofa, went on slowly with my occupation. I was still busy with those delicate bits of embroidery; and I think almost the only pleasure I recollect in that dark time of my life, was the progress I made with these. I was putting some of them together now--"making them up," as we call it in our woman's language. I had a great pride in my needlework, and I have always had a singular pleasure in construction--so I was almost comfortable once more, and sometimes had such a thrill of strange delight at my heart, that it almost was a pang mingled of pain and joy, to see the definite shape these fine delicate bits of cambric took under my fingers. All this while Alice sat by working at similar work, and telling me tales of young wives like myself, and of mothers and children, and of all the natural experiences of womanhood. Like myself! with a shudder I wondered within myself whether there was one other in the world like me. After a while, when I wearied of this--as, indeed, in my present mood of mind and weakness of frame, I soon wearied of anything, I made Alice get her bonnet and come out with me. It was now getting towards evening, and the usual hum of play and of rest, which always is about a comfortable village after the day's work is over, was pleasantly audible here. At some distance from our house, behind it, some lads were playing cricket in a field, and women were gossiping at the cottage doors, and men lounging about, many of them in their blue woollen shirts and glazed hats--sailors, as we fancied in our ignorance, though they were, in reality, only watermen, who went a fishing sometimes, after a somewhat ignoble fashion, to the mouth of the river, and managed these pleasure-boats when they were at home. We wandered down close to the river, where the water now came rustling up to our feet, creeping closer and closer in every wave. "It is the tide," said I, with involuntary reverence. Alice did not know much about the tide, but her heart, like every other natural heart, was charmed by that liquid soft-ringing music, the ripple of the water, as it rose and fell upon the beach, and Alice was reverential too. I bent down myself like a child, to put my hand upon the pebbly wet line, and feel the soft water heaving up upon it higher and higher. Ships were still passing down the beautiful calm river, gliding away silently into the night and the sea--the soft hum of the village was behind us, the musical cadence of these gentle waves