thusiast as regards music. She did not notice particularly then,
but she remembered afterwards, with what a blushing cheek and beautiful
glance the dainty young girl received his bow, and responded to his few
respectful words of pleasure at meeting the daughter of a man whom he
had learned to regard with so much respect.

Mr. Sylvester was in a room by himself. The few glimpses obtained of him
by his friends, convinced them all, that this trouble touched him more
deeply than those who knew his wife intimately could have supposed. Yet
he was calm, and already wore that fixed look of rigidity which was
henceforth to distinguish the expression of his fine and noble features.

In the ride to Greenwood he spoke little. Paula who sat in the carriage
with him did not receive a word, though now and then his eye wandered
towards her with an expression that drove the blood to her heart, and
made the whole day one awful memory of incomprehensible agony and dim
but terrible forebodings. The ways of the human soul, in its crises of
grief or remorse were so new to her. She had passed her life beside
rippling streams and in peaceful meadows, and now all at once, with
shadow on shadow, the dark pictures of life settled down before her, and
she could not walk without stumbling upon jagged rocks, deep yawning
chasms and caves of impenetrable gloom.

The sight of the grave appalled her. To lay in such a bed as that, the
fair and delicate head that had often found the downy pillows of its
azure couch too hard for its languid pressure. To hide in such a dismal,
deep, dark gap, a form so white and but a little while before, so
imposing in its splendor and so commanding in its requirements. The
thought of heaven brought no comfort. The beauty they had known lay
here; soulless, inert, rigid and responseless, but here. It was gifted
with no wings with which to rise. It owned no attachment to higher
spheres. Death had scattered the leaves of this white rose, but from all
the boundless mirror of the outspread heavens, no recovered semblance of
its perfected beauty, looked forth to solace Paula or assuage the misery
of her glance into this gloomy pit. Ah, Ona, the social ladder reaches
high, but it does not scale the regions where your poor soul could find
comfort now.

Bertram saw the white look on Paula's face and silently offered his arm.
But there are moments when no mortal help can aid us; instants when the
soul stands as solitary in the u