CHAPTER VIII.
O'er him, whose doom thy virtues grieve, Aerial forms shall sit at eve, and bend the pensive head.
COLLINS The monk, who had before appeared, returned in the evening to offer consolation to Emily, and brought a kind message from the lady abbess, inviting her to the convent.

Emily, though she did not accept the offer, returned an answer expressive of her gratitude.

The holy conversation of the friar, whose mild benevolence of manners bore some resemblance to those of St.Aubert, soothed the violence of her grief, and lifted her heart to the Being, who, extending through all place and all eternity, looks on the events of this little world as on the shadows of a moment, and beholds equally, and in the same instant, the soul that has passed the gates of death, and that, which still lingers in the body.

'In the sight of God,' said Emily, 'my dear father now exists, as truly as he yesterday existed to me; it is to me only that he is dead; to God and to himself he yet lives!' The good monk left her more tranquil than she had been since St.Aubert died; and, before she retired to her little cabin for the night, she trusted herself so far as to visit the corpse.

Silent, and without weeping, she stood by its side.