m. I believe it was that speech, coming to her ears
by some busy tongue or other, that made Lady Catherine so bitter
afterwards; but Master Arthur and his bride came home to the
farmhouse, where the parlour and the best bedroom were set apart for
their use; and the poor old father and mother were proud to serve and
entertain them. They were a young pair; for, as I have said, he was in
his nineteenth, and she in her seventeenth year--a handsome pair, too,
and more alike than one would have supposed from the difference of
their birth. Menie had a genteel, quiet carriage, and really looked
like a lady in the church-pew beside our young master, whom we seldom
saw but at a distance--for his spirit was too high to come near the
castle--and though it wasn't just told us, we all knew that going to
the farmhouse would be reckoned the full value of our places.

It was the fall of the year when Lady Catherine left us--all that
winter she spent in Paris; and when the spring again came round, we
heard of her opening house with even more than usual gaiety in London.
That was a great season with her ladyship. In its course, she got her
daughters both married to her mind. The one wedded a baronet, and the
other a right honourable; but scarcely had the newspapers fully
announced his sisters' wedding-breakfasts, and how the happy pairs set
out, when Master Arthur was seized with sudden sickness. He had been
fishing in a mountain-lake, and got drenched to the skin by the rain
of a thunder-storm, overexerted himself in walking home, and caught a
pleurisy. The whole parish felt for the poor young man, who had been
so hardly used by his mother, and many were the inquiries made for him
at the farmhouse. There was wild wo there, for every day he got worse;
and within the week, Menie was left a widow. Lady Catherine had gone
back to Paris at the close of the season; one of her married daughters
was in Italy, and the other in Switzerland; but two cousins of their
father were to be found in England; and Master Arthur was laid in the
family vault, under our old parish church, before the intelligence
reached them. Lady Catherine came back in deep mourning, and alone,
but not a whit subdued in spirit: she had been heard to say, that her
son was better dead than disgraced; and her estate was at least safe
from being shared by peasants. Of her daughter-in-law, she never took
the slightest notice. People said, the poor young widow's heart was
broken, f