First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth").

Her abundant hair, too, was black, and to-day seemed doubly sombre by contrast with the gold netting which confined it.

As they looked into mine, I caught a glimpse of something half-hidden, half-revealed, something fiercely sombre, which frightened me.

Nowhere else did the evening gray and sombre into the mysterious night impalpably as here.