My grief
darkened with a wild presaging of danger, and a sense of the supernatural
fell upon me. It was the saddest and most awful evening that had come since
my beloved father's death.
All kinds of shapeless fears environed me in silence. For the first time,
dire misgivings about the form of faith affrighted me. Who were these
Swedenborgians who had got about him--no one could tell how--and held
him so fast to the close of his life? Who was this bilious, bewigged,
black-eyed Doctor Bryerly, whom none of us quite liked and all a little
feared; who seemed to rise out of the ground, and came and went, no one
knew whence or whither, exercising, as I imagined, a mysterious authority
over him? Was it all good and true, or a heresy and a witchcraft? Oh, my
beloved father! was it all well with you?
When Lady Knollys entered, she found me in floods of tears, walking
distractedly up and down the room. She kissed me in silence; she walked
back and forward with me, and did her best to console me.
'I think, Cousin Monica, I would wish to see him once more. Shall we go
up?'
'Unless you really wish it very much, I think, darling, you had better not
mind it.
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