"Ah, that is how they talk when those we love
are— One word! I shall never see my poor
little Jenny again; shall I?"

Yes, Alfred: if you will but follow her steps
and believe in Him, who soothed her last hour
and made her face shine with joy like an angel's
while we all wept around; oh dear, oh dear, oh
dear, he said he had but one true friend in the
world. Alas! it is so; you have but me now
who pity you and love you more than heart can
utter; my own, my beloved, my bereaved."

What could soften such a shock as this? It
fell, and his anguish was frightful, all the more
so that he ascribed the calamity to his imprisonment,
and mingled curses and threats of
vengeance with his bursts of grief. He spurned
the consolations of religion: he said heaven
was as unjust as earth, as cruel as hell.

She cried out and stopped his mouth with
her hand: she almost forced him to kneel beside
her, and prayed aloud for him: and when at last
his agony found vent in tears, she put her innocent
arms round his neck and wept with him.

Every now and then the poor fellow would
almost shriek with remorse. "Oh, if I had only
been kinder to her! if I had but been kinder to
her!"

"You were kind to her," said Julia, softly but
firmly.

"No, no; I was always sneering at her. And
why? I knew her religion was sincere: but my
little mind fixed on a few phrases she had picked
up from others, and I— " He could say no
more, but groaned with anguish; and let his
remorse be a caution to us all. Bereaved we
all must be, who live on and on: but this,
bereavement's bitterest drop, we may avoid.

"Alfred," said Julia, " do not torment yourself.
We girls care little about a few sarcasms;
it is the cold heart that wounds us. You loved
Jane, and she knew it well, and joyed in it.
You were kinder to her than you think, and so
her dying thoughts were for you. It was for
you she asked, and made your father send for you,
and poor I hoped you would come. And, dearest,
her last act was to write a few words to you,
and trust them to her who she knew loved you
better than heart can utter. Since it was her
wish, let us try and read them together, the last
words of a saint (I have never seen them), and,
if they do not prove words of love, then I will
let you think you were not a good brother to her
you and I, and poor, poor Edward, have lost."

He made a sad sign of assent; and Julia rose
and got the enclosure. But, as Jane's last
written words reappeared on the scene in a
somewhat remarkable way, I will only say here,
that both these poor young things tried in vain
to read them, and both in turn burst out sobbing,
so that they could not: so they held the paper,
and tried to see the words out of their streaming
eyes. And these two mourners had the room to
themselves till midnight; for even Mrs. Dodd's
hostility respected Alfred then, and as for Julia,
she was one of those who rise with the occasion:
she was half wife, half angel from Heaven to
her bereaved lover through all those bitter
hours.

CHAPTER LI.

No life was ever yet a play: I mean an
unbroken sequence of dramatic incidents. Calms
will come; unfortunately for the readers,
happily for the read. And I remember seeing it
objected to novelists, by a young gentleman just
putting his foot for the first time into " Criticism,"
that the writers aforesaid suppress the
small intermediate matters which in real life
come by the score between each brilliant event,
and so present the ordinary and the extraordinary
parts of life in false proportions. Now, if
this remark had been offered by way of contrast
between events themselves and all mortal
attempts to reproduce them upon paper or the
stage, it would have been philosophical; but it
was a strange error to denounce the practice as
distinctive of fiction: for it happens to be the
one trait the novelist and dramatist have in
common with the evangelist. The gospels skip
fifteen years of the most interesting life Creation
has witnessed, relating Christ's birth in full, and
hurrying from his boyhood to the more stirring
events of his thirtieth and subsequent years.
And all the inspired histories do much the same
thing. The truth is, that epics, dramas, novels,
histories, chronicles, reports of trials at law, in
a word, all narratives true or fictitious, except
those which true or fictitious nobody reads,
abridge the uninteresting facts as Nature never
did, and dwell as Nature never did on the
interesting ones.

Can nothing, however, be done to restore, in
the reader's judgment, that just balance of "the
sensational" and "the soporific," which all
writers, that have readers, disturb? Nothing, I
think, without his own assistance. But surely
something with it. And, therefore, I throw
myself on the intelligence of my readers; and
ask them to realise, that henceforth pages are no
measure of time, and that to a year big with
strange events, on which I have therefore dilated
in this story, succeeded a year in which few
brilliant things happened to the personages of
this tale: in short, a year to be skimmed by
chronicler or novelist, and yet (mind you) a year
of three hundred and sixty-five days six hours,
or thereabouts, and one in which the quiet,
unobtrusive troubles of our friends' hearts,
especially the female hearts, their doubts, divisions,
distresses, did not remit, far from it. Now
his year I propose to divide into topics, and go
by logical, rather than natural, sequence of
events.

THE LOVERS.

Alfred came every day to see Julia, and Mrs.
Dodd invariably left the room at his knock.

At last Julia proposed to Alfred not to come
to the house for the present; but to accompany
her on her rounds as district visitor. To see and
soothe the bitter calamities of the poor had done