end of his sentences, and beginning
them as sharply. It had lost body and color, was thin, subdued, and
monotonous. Professor Valeyon had changed from a lusty winter into a
broken, infirm, and marrowless thaw.

He stood and watched her weep for a long while, bending his eyes upon
her from beneath their heavy, impending brows. Heavy and impending they
were still, but the vitality--the sort of warm-hearted fierceness--of
his look was gone--gone! A young and bitter grief, like Cornelia's,
coming at a time of life when the feelings are so tender and their
manifestation of pain so poignant--is terrible enough to see, God knows!
but the dry-eyed anguish of the old, of those who no longer possess the
latent, indefinite, all-powerful encouragement of the future to support
them--who can breathe only the lifeless, cheerless air of the
past--grief with them does not convulse: it saps, and chills, and
crumbles away, without noise or any kind of demonstration. The sight
does not terrify or harrow us, but it makes us sick at heart and tinges
our thoughts with a gloomy stain, which rather sinks out of sight than
is worn away.

"Will you stay and watch with her, my dear?" said the old man, at last.
"She'll sleep some hours, I think. I'll take a little sleep myself. Call
me when she wakes."

So Cornelia was left alone to watch her sleeping and dying sister. All
the morning she sat by the bed, almost as motionless as Sophie herself.
Her mind was like a surf-wave that breaks upon the shore, slips back,
regathers itself, and undulates on, to break again. Begin where she
would, she always ended on that bed, with its well-known face, set
around with soft dark hair, always in the same position upon the pillow,
which yielded beneath it in always the same creases and curves.
By-and-by, wherever she turned, still she saw that face, with the pillow
rising around it; and when she shut her eyes, there it was, growing, in
the blackness, clearer the more she tried to avert her mind.

It seemed to Cornelia--for time enters involuntarily into our thoughts
upon all subjects--that the present order of things must have existed
for a far longer period than a single night. How could the events of a
few hours wear such deep and uneffaceable channels in human lives? But
our souls have a chronology of their own, compared with the vividness
and instantaneous workings of which, our bodies bear but a dull and
lagging part. Sorrow and joy, which act upon the s