started away from me, showed
me her foreign purchases, or sang snatches of comic songs.

Dermot went at last to consult the same doctor to whom, half a year
before, he had taken Harold; and it was contrived that he should see
and hear her at a dinner-party without her knowledge. He consoled us
very much by saying that her mind was not touched, and that it was a
fever on the nerves, produced by the never having succumbed to the
unhappiness and the shock which, when he heard in what manner she had
lost Harold, he considered quite adequate to produce such effects.
Indeed, he had been so much struck with Harold himself, that he was
quite startled to hear of his death, and seemed to think an excess of
grief only his due. He bade us take her to her home, give her no
external excitement, and leave her as much as possible to go her own
way, and let her feel herself unwatched, and, if we could, find her
some new yet calming, engrossing occupation.

We took the advice, and poor Lady Diana besought us to remain with her
for the present; nor, indeed, could we have left her. Our chief care
was to hinder her oppressing her daughter with her anxiety; for we
found that Viola was so jealous of being watched that she would hardly
have tolerated us, but that I had real business in packing up my
properties at Mount Eaton. For the first week she took up her old
occupations in the same violent and fitful way, never sitting long to
anything, but rushing out to dash round the garden, and taking long
walks in all weathers, rejecting companionship.

From various causes, chiefly Lady Diana's wretchedness and anxiety,
Dermot and I had to wait a week before we could have the pony-chaise
and go together to Harold's grave. The great, massive, Irish granite
cross was not ready then, and there was only the long, very long, green
mound, at my mother's feet. There lay two wreaths on it. One was a
poor thorn garland--for his own Hydriot children had, we heard, never
left it untended all the winter--the other was of a great
white-flowered rhododendron that was peculiar to the Arked garden.

Was it disloyal to Harry that we thought more of Viola than we did of
him that first time we stood by his grave? It was an immense walk from
Arked to Arghouse Church, over four miles even by the shortest way,
which lay through rough cart-tracks which we had avoided in coming, but
now felt we had better take.

Nearly half way home, under a great, old pollar