o live with Margaret, it was Mrs. Sherwin who was generally selected
to remain in the room with us. By no one could such ungrateful duties of
supervision as those imposed on her, have been more delicately and more
considerately performed.

She always kept far enough away to be out of hearing when we whispered
to each other. We rarely detected her even in looking at us. She had a
way of sitting for hours together in the same part of the room, without
ever changing her position, without occupation of any kind, without
uttering a word, or breathing a sigh. I soon discovered that she was not
lost in thought, at these periods (as I had at first supposed): but lost
in a strange lethargy of body and mind; a comfortless, waking trance,
into which she fell from sheer physical weakness--it was like the
vacancy and feebleness of a first convalescence, after a long illness.
She never changed: never looked better, never worse. I often spoke
to her: I tried hard to show my sympathy, and win her confidence and
friendship. The poor lady was always thankful, always spoke to me
gratefully and kindly, but very briefly. She never told me what were her
sufferings or her sorrows. The story of that lonely, lingering life
was an impenetrable mystery for her own family--for her husband and her
daughter, as well as for me. It was a secret between her and God.

With Mrs. Sherwin as the guardian to watch over Margaret, it may easily
be imagined that I felt none of the heavier oppressions of restraint.
Her presence, as the third person appointed to remain with us, was not
enough to repress the little endearments to which each evening's lesson
gave rise; but was just sufficiently perceptible to invest them with the
character of stolen endearments, and to make them all the more precious
on that very account. Mrs. Sherwin never knew, I never thoroughly knew
myself till later, how much of the secret of my patience under my year's
probation lay in her conduct, while she was sitting in the room with
Margaret and me.

In this solitude where I now write--in the change of life and of all
life's hopes and enjoyments which has come over me--when I look back to
those evenings at North Villa, I shudder as I look. At this moment,
I see the room again--as in a dream--with the little round table, the
reading lamp, and the open books. Margaret and I are sitting together:
her hand is in mine; my heart is with hers. Love, and Youth, and
Beauty--the mortal Trinity o