A Broken Blossom, Vol. 2 of 3 by Florence Marryat

The chief feeling that I experienced when I came to review the events of that evening, was, that my unexpected encounter with Cave Charteris seemed to have dragged my mother out of her grave again. Until that moment I had believed that, little by little, I was learning to bear my great loss with hope and patience, if not with cheerful resignation. I had begun to think of my darling as in another and better world than this-if not actually in heaven, at least amongst the redeemed, willing to wait the moment of her perfection, and entirely separated from all earthly pain and trouble.

I had commenced to lose sense of the waking nightmare that had haunted me for so many weeks after her funeral; of the sight of the dead pinched face under the shrouding sheet; the waxen hands folded stiffly on her sunken breast; and over it all those horrid heavy clods of clay, the rattle of which upon her coffin lid would echo in my heart, I verily believed, until they fell upon my own. I felt the loss of her counsel, her companionship, and her love as keenly-perhaps more keenly than when I had been first deprived of them; but I thought that time had cured me of the terrible human anguish with which I had laid her in the grave. But now it was all revived. The sight of Cave Charteris had brought it back again; brought back the memory of her maternal interest in him, her confidence in his affection for me, and her self-reproach when we discovered that his attentions meant nothing, that she had not better guarded her one ewe lamb from the deceitfulness of the world.