Our tale is nearly ended: what remains of it, must comprise the history of many years in the compass of a few words.
Time passed on; and Death and Change told of its lapse among the family at Langley Hall. Five years after the events above related, Mr Langley died; and was followed to the grave, shortly afterwards, by his wife. Of their two sons, the eldest was rising into good practice at the bar; the youngest had become attaché to a foreign embassy. Their third daughter was married, and living at the family seat of her husband, in Scotland. Mr and Mrs Streatfield had children of their own, now, to occupy their time and absorb their care. The career of life was over for some -- the purposes of life had altered for others -- Jane Langley alone, still remained unchanged.
She now lived entirely with her aunt. At intervals -- as their worldly duties and worldly avocations permitted them -- the other members of her family, or one or two intimate friends, came to the house. Offers of marriage were made to her, but were all declined. The first, last love of her girlish days -- abandoned as a hope, and crushed as a passion; living only as a quiet grief, as a pure remembrance -- still kept its watch, as guardian and defender, over her heart. Years passed on and worked no change in the sad uniformity of her life, until the death of her aunt left her mistress of the house in which she had hitherto been a guest. Then it was observed that she made fewer and fewer efforts to vary the tenor of existence, to forget her old remembrances for awhile in the society of others. Such invitations as reached her from relations and friends were more frequently declined than accepted. She was growing old herself now; and, with each advancing year, the busy pageant of the outer world presented less and less that could attract her eye.
So she began to surround herself, in her solitude, with the favourite books that she had studied, with the favourite music that she had played, in the days of her hopes and her happiness. Everything that was associated, however slightly, with that past period, now acquired a character of inestimable value in her eyes, as aiding her mind to seclude itself more and more strictly in the sanctuary of its early recollections. Was it weakness in her to live thus; to abandon the world and the world's interests, as one who had no hope, or part in either? Had she earned the right, by the magnitude and resolution of her sacrifice, thus to indulge in the sad luxury of fruitless remembrance? Who shall say! -- who shall presume to decide that cannot think with her thoughts, and look back with her recollections!
Thus she lived -- alone, and yet not lonely; without hope, but with no despair; separate and apart from the world around her, except when she approached it by her charities to the poor, and her succour to the afflicted; by her occasional interviews with the surviving members of her family and a few old friends, when they sought her in her calm retreat; and by little presents which she constantly sent to brothers' and sisters' children, who worshipped, as their invisible good genius, 'the kind lady' whom most of them had never seen. Such was her existence throughout the closing years of her life: such did it continue -- calm and blameless -- to the last.
Reader, when you are told, that what is impressive and pathetic in the Drama of Human Life has passed with a past age of Chivalry and Romance, remember Jane Langley, and quote in contradiction the story of the TWIN SISTERS!