the grave the patron on whose life he him self
had conveniently lived. It was in the dismal month of February that I
returned to L----, and I took possession of my plighted nuptial home on
the anniversary of the very day in which I had passed through the dead
dumb world from the naturalist's gloomy death-room.

CHAPTER LXIV.

Lilian's wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert her in the
suspension of her reason. She was habitually calm,--very silent; when
she spoke it was rarely on earthly things, on things familiar to her
past, things one could comprehend. Her thought seemed to have quitted
the earth, seeking refuge in some imaginary heaven. She spoke of
wanderings with her father as if he were living still; she did not seem
to understand the meaning we attach to the word "Death." She would sit
for hours murmuring to herself: when one sought to catch the words, they
seemed in converse with invisible spirits. We found it cruel to disturb
her at such times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene,--more
serenely beautiful than I had seen it even in our happiest hours; but
when we called her back to the wrecks of her real life, her eye became
troubled, restless, anxious, and she would sigh--oh, so heavily! At
times, if we did not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume her
once favourite accomplishments,--drawing, music. And in these her
young excellence was still apparent, only the drawings were strange and
fantastic: they had a resemblance to those with which the painter Blake,
himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the "Night Thoughts" and
"The Grave,"--faces of exquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace,
coming forth from the bells of flowers, or floating upwards amidst
the spray of fountains, their outlines melting away in fountain or in
flower. So with her music: her mother could not recognize the airs she
played, for a while so sweetly and with so ineffable a pathos, that
one could scarcely hear her without weeping; and then would come, as
if involuntarily, an abrupt discord, and, starting, she would cease and
look around, disquieted, aghast.

And still she did not recognize Mrs. Ashleigh nor myself as her mother,
her husband; but she had by degrees learned to distinguish us both from
others. To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, but
not sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longer
absent than usual, me she missed. When, after the toils of t