meals, household duties, work beside an old aunt, and
long solitary walks that these grave little girls would take hand in
hand, speaking but seldom, across the heather now gay with blossom, now
white beneath the snow. At home the father they scarcely saw, who was
wholly indifferent, who took his meals in his room, and would come down
at night to the rectory parlour and read aloud the appallingly dreary
debates of the House of Commons: without, the silence of the adjoining
graveyard, the great treeless desert, and the moors that from autumn to
summer were swept by the pitiless wind from the north.

The hazard of life--for in every life some effort is put forth by
fate--the hazard of life removed Emily three or four times from the
desert she had grown to love, and to consider--as will happen to those
who remain too long in one spot--the only place in the world where the
plants, and the earth, and the sky were truly real and delightful. But
after a few weeks' absence the light would fade from her ardent,
beautiful eyes; she pined for home; and one or another of the sisters
must hasten to bring her back to the lonely vicarage.

In 1843--she was then twenty-five--she returned once again, never more
to go forth until summoned by death. Not an event, or a smile, or a
whisper of love in the whole of her life to the day of this final
return. Nor was her memory charged with one of those griefs or
deceptions, which enable the weaklings, or those who demand too little
of life, to imagine that passive fidelity to something that has of
itself collapsed is an act of virtue; that inactivity is justified by
the tears wherein it is bathed; and that the duty of life is
accomplished when suffering has been made to yield up all its
resignation and sorrow.

Here, in this virgin soul, whose past was a blank, there was nothing
for memory or resignation to cling to; nothing before that last
journey, as nothing after; unless it be mournful vigils by the side of
the brother she nursed--the almost demented brother, whose life was
wrecked by his idleness and a great unfortunate passion; who became an
incurable opium-eater and drunkard. Then, shortly before her
twenty-ninth birthday, on a December afternoon, as she sat in the
little whitewashed parlour combing her long black hair, the comb
slipped from the fingers that were too weak to retain it, and fell into
the fire; and death came to her, more silent even than life, and bore
her away from t