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CHAPTER XII.
"Still the rose is fanned
With life and love's sweet hues."
Croly.
In the meantime how did Lucy bear the horror of Evelyn's death?—with an abandonment to despair it was heart-rending to witness. Fortunately her health was delicate—we say fortunately, for the mind must have yielded, had not the body sunk under the pressure of this first great sorrow. In Lucy"s brief and quiet career, crime and anguish had as yet been but words; sad and gentle regrets might have flung a moment's lightest shadow on her path, but she had known no real suffering, and its first experience was a shock which left her scarcely the power of feeling.
It is an old saying (and most old sayings are singularly true—we are not so very much wiser than our ancestors, after all), that this most violent grief is the soonest over; yes, if this violence rather
