l, leaning upon the table, but she spoke no word,
either in answer to the threat or to the tears. Her immediate object
was to take herself out of the room, but this she did not know how to
achieve. At last her aunt spoke again: "If you please, I will get you
to ask your landlady to send for a cab." Then the cab was procured,
and Buggins, who had come home for his dinner, handed her ladyship
in. Not a word had been spoken during the time that the cab was being
fetched, and when Lady Ball went down the passage, she merely said,
"I wish you good-bye, Margaret."

"Good-bye," said Margaret, and then she escaped to her own bedroom.

Lady Ball had not done her work well. It was not within her power to
induce Margaret to renounce her engagement, and had she known her
niece better, I do not think that she would have made the attempt.
She did succeed in learning that Margaret had received no renewal
of an offer from her son,--that there was, in fact, no positive
engagement now existing between them; and with this, I think, she
should have been satisfied. Margaret had declared that she demanded
nothing from her cousin, and with this assurance Lady Ball should
have been contented. But she had thought to carry her point, to
obtain the full swing of her will, by means of a threat, and had
forgotten that in the very words of her own menace she conveyed to
Margaret some intimation that her son was still desirous of doing
that very thing which she was so anxious to prevent. There was no
chance that her threat should have any effect on Margaret. She ought
to have known that the tone of the woman's mind was much too firm
for that. Margaret knew--was as sure of it as any woman could be
sure--that her cousin was bound to her by all ties of honour. She
believed, too, that he was bound to her by love, and that if he
should finally desert it, he would be moved to do so by mean motives.
It was no anger on the score of Mr Maguire that would bring him to
such a course, no suspicion that she was personally unworthy of
being his wife. Our Griselda, with all her power of suffering and
willingness to suffer, understood all that, and was by no means
disposed to give way to any threat from Lady Ball.

When she was upstairs, and once more in solitude, she disgraced
herself again by crying. She could be strong enough when attacked by
others, but could not be strong when alone. She cried and sobbed upon
her bed, and then, rising, looked at herself in t