ities were all
forgiven in the dismay of learning what their excuse had been; for those
who have so lived as to make themselves least missed, are perhaps at the
first moment the more mourned by good hearts for that very cause.

Augusta was so much terrified on her own account, that she might almost
have been made a hydropathist on the spot; and Robert wrote that poor Sir
Bevil was perfectly overwhelmed with grief and self-reproach, giving
himself no credit for his exemplary patience and forbearance, but
bitterly accusing himself of hardness and neglect. These feelings were
shared in some degree by all the others, and Mervyn was especially
affected. There had been much to soften him since his parents' death,
and the sudden loss of the sister with whom he had always been on terms
of scorn and dislike, shocked him excessively, and drew him closer to the
survivors, sobering him, and silencing his murmurs for the time in real
grief and awe. Bertha likewise was thoroughly overcome, not so much by
these feelings, as by the mere effect of the sudden tidings on her
nervous temperament, and the overclouding of the cheerfulness that had
hitherto surrounded her. This, added to a day of over-fatigue and
exposure, brought back such a recurrence of unfavourable symptoms, that a
return to an English winter was not to be thought of. The south of
France was decided upon at once, and as Lucilla had truly divined, Honor
Charlecote's impulse led them to Hyeres, that she might cast at least one
look at the grave in the Stranger's corner of the cypress-grown
burial-ground, where rested the beloved of her early days, the father of
the darlings of her widowed heart--loved and lost.

She endured her absence from home far better than she had expected, so
much easier was it to stay away than to set off, and so completely was
she bound up with her companions, loving Phoebe like a parent, and the
other two like a nurse, and really liking the brother. All took delight
in the winter paradise of Hyeres, that fragment of the East set down upon
the French coast, and periodically peopled with a motley multitude of
visitors from all the lands of Europe, all invalids, or else attendants
on invalids.

Bertha still shrank from all contact with society, and the ladies, for
her sake, lived entirely apart; but Mervyn made acquaintance, and
sometimes went out on short expeditions with other gentlemen, or to visit
his mercantile correspondents at Marseille