but had never paused to fret over what she
could not help, nor contrast her own high youthful humour and sense of
duty with the dull insensibility around her. But to-day had rapt the
heroic little girl into a different atmosphere from that she had been
breathing hitherto. To-day she was aware that her work had been so far
taken out of her hands, and acknowledged in her heart that it was best
it should be so. She heard the heavy feet of men coming and going,
but was not obliged to descend into immediate conflict with all the
circumstances of so horrible a crisis. It was a new sensation to Nettie.
A year ago, perhaps, she would not have relinquished even that dreadful
business to any one;--to-day, the thought of having some one else who
did it for her, and took comfort in relieving her burdened hands,
fell with singular soothing power upon the heart which had come to a
knowledge of its own weakness in these last tedious months; and as
Nettie sat up-stairs with all the remorseful thoughts of nature in
her softened heart, the impossibility of impressing her own emotions
upon those around her struck her with a deeper sense of impatience,
disappointment, and disgust than ever before. When she went softly into
the darkened room where Susan lay in her gloomy bed, divided between
wailings over the injuries which poor Fred had suffered, the harshness
that had driven him out of doors, and the want of his brother or
somebody to take care of him, which had brought the poor fellow to
such an end--and complaints of the wrong done to herself, the "want of
feeling" shown by her sister, the neglect with which she was treated,
Nettie gazed at the sobbing creature with eyes unconsciously wondering,
yet but half-surprised. She knew very well beforehand that this was how
her dreadful tidings would be received; yet out of her own softened,
awed, compunctious heart--her pity too deep for tears over that lost
life--Nettie looked with the unbelief of nature at the widowed woman,
the creature who had loved him, and been his wife--yet who could only
think of somebody else to be blamed, and of herself injured, at that
terrible moment when the companion of her life was violently withdrawn
from her. And to go out of that obstinately darkened refuge of fretful
sorrow, into the room where the blind had been drawn up the moment
her back was turned, and where these three tearless children, totally
unimpressed by the information which they had received as a