er! Stay! That parlor
door is open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor,
where I used,--oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has
befallen us,--where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe!"

But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,--in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,--when Phoebe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.

"It is our own little Phoebe!--Ah! and Holgrave with, her" exclaimed
he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy. "I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice's Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day."

XXI The Departure

THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant part