n object and
lavished itself upon her brother. She went to live with an aunt, her
father's sister, and when she was eighteen her aunt brought her to
London, a tall, heavy and rather clumsy country girl, arrested rather
than developed by grief. Her aunt was a world-worn, harassed woman; she
had married off her four daughters with difficulty and felt the need of
a change of occupation; but she accepted as a matter of course the duty
of marrying off Amabel. That task accomplished she would go to bed every
night at half past ten and devote her days to collecting coins and
enamels. Her respite came far more quickly than she could have imagined
possible. Amabel had promise of great beauty, but two or three years
were needed to fulfill it; Mrs. Compton could but be surprised when Sir
Hugh Channice, an older colleague of Bertram's, a fashionable and
charming man, asked for the hand of her unformed young charge. Sir Hugh
was fourteen years Amabel's senior and her very guilelessness no doubt
attracted him; then there was the money; he was not well off and he
lived a life rather hazardously full. Still, Mrs. Compton could hardly
believe in her good-fortune. Amabel accepted her own very simply; her
compliance and confidence were even deeper than before. Sir Hugh was the
most graceful of lovers. His quizzical tenderness reminded her of her
father, his quasi-paternal courtship emphasized her instinctive trust in
the beauty and goodness of life.

So at eighteen she was married at St. George's Hanover Square and wore a
wonderful long satin train and her mothers lace veil and her mother's
pearls around her neck and hair. A bridesmaid had said that pearls were
unlucky, but Mrs. Compton tersely answered:--"Not if they are such good
ones as these." Amabel had bowed her head to the pearls, seeing them,
with the train, and the veil, and her own snowy figure, vaguely, still
in the dreamlike haze. Memories of her father and mother, and of the
dear deanery among its meadows, floating fragments of the poetry her
father had loved, of the prayers her mother had taught her in childhood,
hovered in her mind. She seemed to see the primrose woods where she had
wandered, and to hear the sound of brooks and birds in Spring. A vague
smile was on her lips. She thought of Sir Hugh as of a radiance lighting
all. She was the happiest of girls.

Shortly after her marriage, all the radiance, all the haze was gone. It
had been difficult then to know why. Now,