Yet there was nothing in that sweet and brief.
And perished intercourse, now closed to me,
To add one thought unto my bitterest grief
Upbraiding thee. —Owen Meredith.
It would be too painful to follow the young and deeply wronged wife through the first weeks of her great trouble.
They were passed in paroxysms of vehement and inconsolable sorrow, alternating with periods of dull stupor, partly the result of reaction from high excitement, and partly the influence of the nervine sedative administered by her nurse.
The course pursued by this woman in the treatment of her young patient was upon the whole very judicious. She did not lecture her on the subject of her inordinate abandonment to grief and despair. But she artfully drew her attention away from the contemplation of her troubles, to the consideration of those last and most important preparations for the arrival of the little expected stranger, in which mothers and nurses usually find such absorbing interest.
She amused the youthful matron with certain necessary alterations in the arrangements of her chamber, with fitting up of an adjoining room as a nursery, with the decorating and furnishing of an infant’s basket, and a berceaunette or wicker cradle, and with the arranging of the liliputian wardrobe in a beautiful miniature bureau.
In these natural and pleasing occupations, Drusilla found some relief from her heavy sorrow.
The late October weather was glorious with all the gorgeous splendor of the Indian summer, glowing through the heavens and the earth, and kindling up the foliage around the wildwood home with a beauty and refulgence of color, richer and brighter than those of spring or summer.