This strange interruption of all plans, which it was evident filled Charlotte with despair, gave me much to think of, as I stayed behind in the slowly darkening room. It was evident that now nothing could be concealed from him; and who was there so bold as to tell the bereaved father, in his first grief for his firstborn, what horrors had accompanied Colin’s death, and what a penalty the family had to pay? I cast over in my mind every expedient, but nothing seemed practicable, no way of disclosing the situation without such a shock as might kill. The half-dismantled room looked more and more dreary as the light faded away. The door stood open as when that little procession quitted it. My senses were all on the alert. It seemed to me that the premonition of some fresh calamity was in the air; and when Charlotte came down about half an hour later, like a ghost through the dim-coming shadows, I almost expected to hear that it had already occurred. But even in these depths of distress, it was a happiness to me to feel that she came to me for relief. She dropped into a chair close by the window where I was standing. I could just see the soft, pale lines of her face--the look of restrained anxiety in her eyes. She told me that he had gone to bed without asking any further questions, and that Margaret, who had been Colin’s nurse, seemed almost more agreeable to him than herself. He had turned his face to the wall, as he had said, and nothing but a long-drawn, occasional sigh told that he was awake. “I think he is not worse--in body,” she said. “He has borne it far better than we could have thought possible. But how am I to tell him the way it happened, and how am I to tell him about Ellermore?” She wept with a prostration and self-abandonment which alarmed me; but she stopped my remonstrances and entreaties with a motion of her hand. “Oh, let me cry! It is the only ease I have,” she said. When she had gone away from me, restless, anxious, afraid to be out of hearing, I went out, myself, as restless, as incapable of banishing all these anxieties from my mind as she. The night was almost dark, soft and mild. It was one of those nights when the moon, without being visible, softens and ameliorates the gloom, and makes of night a sort of twilight.