"Is her niece with her?"
"I don't know, Sir."
"Don't you?"
"Oh no! we don't know anything more about Miss Miriam, since she is not to marry Cornelius."
Mr. Smalley turned pale and red, and pale again; but he never put a question to me. He constrained himself to talk of the weather, of what a fine day it was (the rain was drizzling), of how happy it made him to hear Cornelius was so successful (we had never said a word about his success); then he left off at once, rose and bade me good-bye, to my infinite relief, for I was conscious of having committed an indiscretion, and not the first either.
Within the course of the same month, as we sat at breakfast, Kate, who was reading the newspaper, suddenly uttered an exclamation which she as hastily checked. Cornelius took the paper from her hand, glanced over it, and read aloud very calmly—
"On the twelfth instant, at St. George's, Hanover Square, the Rev. Morton
Smalley, of Rugby, to Miriam Russell, eldest daughter of the late Thomas
Russell, Esq., of Southwell, Norfolk."
"Smalley deserved a better wife," said Cornelius; and he handed back the paper to Kate, without betraying the least sign of emotion. It was thus we learned how utterly dead Miriam was in his heart.
What sort of a wife did she make to Morton Smalley, in his wild northern home? I know not, no more than I know what, unless the thirst of agitation and change, could induce a spirit so feverish and unquiet to unite itself to that pure and calm nature. Did she find peace in his devoted love, and in fulfilling the duties that fall to the lot of a clergyman's wife? Perhaps she did, and perhaps too he drew forth whatever her nature held of good and true. A year after her marriage she died in giving birth to a child, who still lives, and whom her father persists in calling the image of his dear departed saint, though his eyes alone can trace in her the faintest resemblance to her dead mother.
I was not with Cornelius when this event occurred, and how he felt on learning the death of the woman with whom he had thought to spend his life, is more than I have ever known.