During this separation, her uncle wrote her long letters, overflowing with affection and regret that he had suffered her to leave him. Indeed, she would never have consented to absent herself from his side for an hour, had she not been expecting a visit at Wheatland from her sister, Mrs. Baker, whose sweet companionship she had missed in all her pleasures and triumphs. It was soon after her happy arrival at dear old Wheatland, with the welcome of friends still in her ears, and amid hurried and loving preparations for the reception of this beautiful and only sister, that the dreadful tidings of her death on the distant shores of the Pacific, smote on the sad heart of Harriet. In the agony of her first great grief, brooding over the memory of this twin soul, often did she echo in feeling those verses of Tennyson:
“Ah yet, even yet, if this might be,
I, falling on thy faithful heart,
Would, breathing through thy lips, impart
The life that almost dies in me.
“That dies not, but endures with pain,
And slowly forms the firmer mind;
Treasuring the look it cannot find,
The words that are not heard again.”
Under these sad circumstances Mr. Buchanan came home, and the news of his nomination for the Presidency soon afterward reached Wheatland. Miss Lane heard it, not with indifference, but with less enthusiasm than she had shown about anything in which her uncle was concerned. She, however, received his friends with a grace which, if sadder than of old, was none the less interesting; and the noble figure clad in mourning, and the modest, tender face beneath her dark English hat, will never be forgotten by those who saw Harriet Lane dispensing the dignified hospitalities of Mr. Buchanan’s table, or calmly strolling over the lawn during the summer of 1856.