eemed to
dread advancing: at last both stopped and began to whisper. They were
evidently much moved, and the fear that I might be in their way
occurring to me again, I told them of it, and expressed a hope that I
was not intruding.

"No, no, sir," cried they together, turning their poor sorrow-thinned
faces toward me, as though they had interpreted my words as a
reproach. "No, no, sir, we are very glad to see you;" and they led the
way to their cottage door. Here, however, they paused again, and
looked dismally at me. Their emotion, too long pent up, was mastering
them. "The fact is, sir," said the old man, trying, but in vain, to
smile as he saw my eyes fixed upon him--"The fact is, sir, we have not
been quite hap--py, not quite hap--py, to--day--sir;" and he looked at
me apologetically, as though his grief had been a fault to him, whilst
two big tears, for a time kept in by an effort, rolled stealthily down
his cheeks.

I am but a poor comforter even at the best of moments, but in this
instance, not knowing upon what chord to touch, my speaking could be
of very little avail; nevertheless, I hazarded a few consolatory
words, such as we always have at hand to exhort sufferers to bear
their ills with patience and look beyond the cloud surrounding them to
hopes of better things; but I am afraid all I said was very
meaningless, for the affliction of which I had been the witness,
without knowing its cause, having in a manner impregnated my own
heart, I was too much in need of comfort myself to be able to impart
any to others. The two men thanked me, however, artlessly, naively,
and seemed about to initiate me into the secret of their distress,
when the cottage door by which we were standing opened, and a woman
with an anxious, inquiring expression on her face came out to meet us.
She was old, being perhaps fifty-five years of age, but Time had dealt
less harshly with her features than Grief, and the wrinkles which
furrowed her cheeks and contracted her forehead into thin, shriveled
folds showed less the footprints of departed seasons than the marks of
that hard iron hand of Sorrow whose least touches sear more surely
than fire. Her hair was white as spun-glass, and neatly confined under
one of those high Norman caps of which the long starched frills,
encircling the face, lend a cold, severe expression to the wearer: her
gait was stooping, her steps feeble, and her whole appearance denoted
lassitude and weakness. She was,