m for the
rest of the night, if there were nothing for me to do. She put her arms
round my neck and kissed me as if she had been my sister, telling me I
could leave every thing to her. Then I went away into the solitude that
had indeed begun to close around me.

When the heart of a man is solitary, there is no society for him even
among a crowd of friends. All deep love and close companionship seemed
stricken out of my life.

We laid her in the cemetery, in a grave where the wide-spreading
branches of some beech-trees threw a pleasant shadow over it during the
day. At times the moan of the sea could be heard there, when the surf
rolled in strongly upon the shore of Cobo Bay. The white crest of the
waves could be seen from it, tossing over the sunken reefs at sea; yet
it lay in the heart of our island. She had chosen the spot for herself,
not very long ago, when we had been there together. Now I went there
alone.

I counted my father and his loud grief as nothing. There was neither
sympathy nor companionship between us. He was very vehement in his
lamentations, repeating to every one who came to condole with us that
there never had lived such a wife, and his loss was the greatest that
man could bear. His loss was nothing to mine.

Yet I did draw a little nearer to him in the first few weeks of our
bereavement. Almost insensibly I fell into our old plan of sharing the
practice, for he was often unfit to go out and see our patients. The
house was very desolate now, and soon lost those little delicate traces
of feminine occupancy which constitute the charm of a home, and to which
we had been all our lives accustomed. Julia could not leave her own
household, even if it had been possible for her to return to her place
in our deserted dwelling. The flowers faded and died unchanged in the
vases, and there was no dainty woman's work lying about--that litter of
white and colored shreds of silk and muslin, which give to a room an
inhabited appearance. These were so familiar to me, that the total
absence of them was like the barrenness of a garden without flowers in
bloom.

My father did not feel this as I did, for he was not often at home after
the first violence of his grief had spent itself. Julia's house was open
to him in a manner it could not be open to me. I was made welcome there,
it is true; but Julia was not unembarrassed and at home with me. The
half-engagement renewed between us rendered it difficult to us both to