te. Her carelessness is past endurance."

"Make her buy some new shavings, mamma, for baby's sake."

"Do be quiet, and get your lunch. Hand your uncle the dish of
currants."

Philip languidly picked a few bunches. He had noticed nothing that had
passed, as his sister was glad to observe. Besides being too much
accustomed, to hear complaints of the servants to give any heed to them,
he was now engrossed with his own wretched thoughts. Every five minutes
that passed without bringing a reply from Margaret, went to confirm his
most painful impressions.

Margaret meantime was sitting alone in her chamber, enduring the long
morning as she best might. Now plying her needle as if life depended on
her industry, and now throwing up her employment in disgust, she
listened for the one sound she needed to hear, till her soul was sick of
every other. "I must live wholly within myself now," she thought, "as
far as he is concerned. I can never speak of him, or allow Hester and
Maria to speak of him to me; for they will blame him. Every one will
blame him: Maria did yesterday. No one will do him justice. I cannot
ask Mrs Grey, as I intended, anything of what she may have seen and
heard about all this. I have had my joy to myself: I have carried about
my solitary glory and bliss in his being mine; and now I must live alone
upon my grief for him; for no one person in the world will pity and
justify him but myself. He has done me no wrong that he could help.
His staying away to-day is to save me pain, as he thinks. I wish I had
not said in my letter that he has been harsh to me. Perhaps he would
have been here by this time if I had not said that. How afraid he was,
that day in the spring when he urged me so to marry at once--(Oh! if I
had, all this would have been saved! and yet I thought, and I still
think, I was right.) But how afraid he was of our parting, lest evil
should come between us! I promised him it should not, for my own part:
but who could have thought that the mistrust would be on his side? He
had a superstitious feeling, he said, that something would happen--that
we should be parted: and I would not hear of it. How presumptuous I
was! How did I dare to make so light of what has come so dreadfully
true?--Oh! why are we so made that we cannot see into one another's
hearts? If we are made to depend on one another so absolutely as we
are, so that we hold one another's peace to cherish or to crush, why is