Emily May now entered, but Sophie was too much absorbed in her sorrow, Mrs. Green too much interested in the subject on hand, to notice the absence of Lieutenant Wilde, or the unusual seriousness of her countenance and manner. Emily silently took her seat, without mentioning the occurrence of the hour. With an instinctive fear of leaving Sophie alone with Emily then and there, Mrs. Gardiner Green dismissed her carriage and announced her intention of remaining the day, and of returning in the afternoon with Mrs. May. Emily observed the dejection of Sophie, but silently attributed it to ill health, weak nerves, &c., and dwelt slightly upon the circumstance, her thoughts being engaged with the drowned woman then lying in the fish-house. * * * * * That morning Mr. Withers had been requested, upon account of the sparse population, to form one of a coroner’s jury, to sit upon the case of a drowned _person_, at four o’clock in the afternoon, at Heath Hall. The hasty summons conveyed no further information. With a strange abstraction of mind he had not looked deeply into the subject of the note—and penning a hasty answer, he promised to be on the spot at the appointed hour. The dinner-table had been cleared away at Heath Hall. Mrs. Gardiner Green had sustained the chief burden of the conversation all day. Lieutenant Wilde had not returned; and to the inquiry of Mrs. Green relative to his absence (which, by the way, she rejoiced in), Emily had replied that sudden business had recalled him to the village, and there the subject dropped. She still refrained from mentioning the occurrence of the morning. Then Mrs. Gardiner Green, taking advantage of the momentary absence of Miss Churchill, informed Mrs. May that the marriage day of her dear young friend Sophie Churchill with Mr. Withers, was fixed for the fifteenth of the current month; that thus it would take place in little more than a week from that day—that the ceremony would be performed at her house, &c., &c. Emily received this information with pain and surprise, but was prevented replying by the re-entrance of Sophie. She was no longer at a loss to guess the reason of Miss Churchill’s ill looks; she turned her head away, for her heart was swelling and her eyes were filling with tears. They were engaged then, she thought. Well! well! she had hoped it would have been otherwise, but they were engaged—the marriage near at hand. As Emily looked from the window she started on observing a small cavalcade approaching the house, and muttering to herself—“Oh! how thoughtless, how careless of Augustus,” went out to meet it. It was the dead body of the drowned woman borne along on a litter. “Oh, _why_ have you done this, Augustus?” she asked of her brother, as the litter was set down in front of the piazza.