e day of the sun," melted as they fell and
sunk into her heart, and she began to weep. He knew that her mother
could not live long, and wishing to withdraw her from a scene which
might give a shock from which her nerves would long vibrate, he
committed her to the care of a neighbor, who took her to her own home.
Mrs. Gleason died at midnight, while Helen lay in a deep sleep,
unconscious of the deeper slumbers that wrapped the dead.

And now a terrible trial awaited her. She had never looked on the face
of death, and she shrunk from the thought with a dread which no language
can express. When her father, sad and silent, with knit brow and
quivering lip, led her to the chamber where her mother lay, she resisted
his guidance, and declared she would never, never go in _there_. It
would have been well to have yielded to her wild pleadings, her tears
and cries. It would have been well to have waited till reason was
stronger and more capable of grappling with terror, before forcing her
to read the first awful lesson of mortality. But Mr. Gleason thought it
his duty to require of her this act of filial reverence, an act he would
have deemed it sacrilegious to omit. He was astonished, grieved, angry
at her resistance, and in his excitement he used some harsh and bitter
words.

Finding persuasions and threats in vain, he summoned Miss Thusa, telling
her he gave into her charge an unnatural, rebellious child, with whose
strange temper he was then too weak to contend. It was a pity he
summoned such an assistant, for Miss Thusa thought it impious as well as
unnatural, and she had bound herself too by a sacred promise, that she
would not suffer Helen to _fear_ in death the mother whom in life she
had so dearly loved. Helen, when she looked into those still, commanding
eyes, felt that her doom was sealed, and that she need struggle no more.
In despair, rather than submission, she yielded, if it can be called
yielding, to suffer herself to be dragged into a room, which she never
entered afterwards without dread.

The first glance at the interior of the chamber, struck a chill through
her heart. It was so still, so chill, so dim, yet so white. The curtains
of white muslin fell in long, slumberous folds down to the floor, their
fringes resting lifelessly on the carpet. The tables and chairs were all
covered with white linen, and something shrouded in white was stretched
out on a table in the centre of the room. The sheet which covered