trumpet sounds and the graves give up their dead at
the resurrection!" Through what mortal crime and horror, through what
darkest windings of the way down to death--the lost creature had
wandered in God's leading to the last home that, living, she never
hoped to reach! In that sacred rest I leave her--in that dread
companionship let her remain undisturbed.

So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my
life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first
came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes
away in the loneliness of the dead.

III

Four months elapsed. April came--the month of spring--the month of
change.

The course of time had flowed through the interval since the winter
peacefully and happily in our new home. I had turned my long leisure
to good account, had largely increased my sources of employment, and
had placed our means of subsistence on surer grounds. Freed from the
suspense and the anxiety which had tried her so sorely and hung over
her so long, Marian's spirits rallied, and her natural energy of
character began to assert itself again, with something, if not all, of
the freedom and the vigour of former times.

More pliable under change than her sister, Laura showed more plainly
the progress made by the healing influences of her new life. The worn
and wasted look which had prematurely aged her face was fast leaving
it, and the expression which had been the first of its charms in past
days was the first of its beauties that now returned. My closest
observations of her detected but one serious result of the conspiracy
which had once threatened her reason and her life. Her memory of
events, from the period of her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of
our meeting in the burial-ground of Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond
all hope of recovery. At the slightest reference to that time she
changed and trembled still, her words became confused, her memory
wandered and lost itself as helplessly as ever. Here, and here only,
the traces of the past lay deep--too deep to be effaced.

In all else she was now so far on the way to recovery that, on her best
and brightest days, she sometimes looked and spoke like the Laura of
old times. The happy change wrought its natural result in us both.
From their long slumber, on her side and on mine, those imperishable
memories of our past life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and