"I didn't know that Mrs. Carleton had a sister.--What's her name?"
"Lady Peterborough."
Constance was silent again.
"What are you going to do about mourning, Fleda? wear white, I suppose. As nobody there knows anything about you, you won't care."
"I do not care in the least," said Fleda calmly; "my feeling would quite as soon choose white as black. Mourning so often goes alone, that I should think grief might be excused for shunning its company."
"And as you have not put it on yet," said Constance, "you won't feel the change. And then in reality after all he was only a cousin."
Fleda's quiet mood, sober and tender as it was, could go to a certain length of endurance, but this asked too much. Dropping the things from her hands, she turned from the trunk beside which she was kneeling and hiding her face on a chair wept such tears as cousins never shed for each other. Constance was startled and distressed; and Fleda's quick sympathy knew that she must be, before she could see it.
"You needn't mind it at all, dear Constance," she said as soon as she could speak,--"it's no matter--I am in such a mood sometimes that I cannot bear anything. Don't think of it," she said kissing her.
Constance however could not for the remainder of her visit get back her wonted light mood, which indeed had been singularly wanting to her during the whole interview.
Mrs. Carleton counted the days to the steamer, and her spirits rose with each one. Fleda's spirits were quiet to the last degree, and passive, too passive, Mrs. Carleton thought. She did not know the course of the years that had gone, and could not understand how strangely Fleda seemed to herself now to stand alone, broken off from her old friends and her former life, on a little piece of time that was like an isthmus joining two continents. Fleda felt it all exceedingly; felt that she was changing from one sphere of life to another; never forgot the graves she had left at Queechy, and as little the thoughts and prayers that had sprung up beside them. She felt, with all Mrs. Carleton's kindness, that she was completely alone, with no one on her side the ocean to look to; and glad to be relieved from taking active part in anything she made her little Bible her companion for the greater part of the time.