Thomas Wingfold. Volume III by George MacDonald

How the terrible time, terrible for its very dulness and / insensibility, passed until it brought the funeral, Helen could not / have told. It seemed to her, as she looked back upon it, a bare / blank, yet was the blank full of a waste weariness of heart. The / days were all one, outside and inside. Her heart was but a lonely / narrow bay to the sea of cold immovable fog that filled the world. / No one tried to help, no one indeed knew her trouble. Everyone took / it for grief at the loss of her brother, while to herself it was the / oppression of a life that had not even the interest of pain. The / curate had of course called to inquire after her, but had not been / invited to enter. George had been everywhere with help, but had no / word to speak.

The day of the funeral came, in thin fog and dull cold. The few / friends gathered. The body was borne to the Abbey. The curate / received it at the gate in the name of the church -- which takes our / children in its arms, and our bodies into its garden -- save indeed / where her gardener is some foolish priest who knows not the heart of / his mother, and will pick and choose among her dead; -- the lovely / words of the last-first of the apostles, were read; and earth was / given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great / workman works withal. Cold was Helen's heart, cold her body, cold / her very being. The earth, the air, the mist, the very light was / cold. The past was cold, the future yet colder. She would have / grudged Leopold his lonely rest in the grave, but that she had not / feeling enough even for that. Her life seemed withering away from / her, like an autumn flower in the frosts of winter; and she, as if / she had been but a flower, did not seem to care. What was life / worth, when it had not strength to desire even its own continuance? / Heartless she returned from the grave, careless of George's mute / attentions, not even scornful of her aunt's shallow wail over the / uncertainty of life and all things human, -- so indifferent to the / whole misery that she walked straight up to the room, hers once / more, from which the body had just been carried, and which, for so / many many weary weeks, had been the centre of loving pain, sometimes / agony. Once more she was at peace -- but what a peace!