pated her taking the common-sense view of the matter, felt
chilled by the result.

Life had fallen back into its old grooves at Bury Castle. Grief, with
the Countess, was usually a passionate, but also a transitory feeling.
Her extremely easy temper led her to get rid of a sorrow as soon as ever
she could. Pain, whether mental or bodily, was in her eyes not a
necessary discipline, but an unpleasant disturbance of the proper order
of events. In fact, she was one of those persons who are always popular
by reason of their gracious affability, but in whom, below the fair flow
of sweet waters, there is a strong substratum of stony selfishness. She
objected to people being in distress, not because it hurt them, but
because it hurt her to see them. And the difference between the two,
though it may scarcely show at times on the surface, lies in an entire
and essential variety of the strata underneath.

It was only natural that, with this character, the Countess should
expect others to be as little impressed by suffering as herself. She
really had no conception of a disposition to which sorrow was not an
easily-healed scratch, but a scar that would be carried to the grave.
In her eyes, the calamity which had happened to her daughter was a
disappointment, undoubtedly, but one which she would find no difficulty
in surmounting at all. There were plenty of other men in the world,
quite as handsome, as amiable, as rich, and as noble, as Richard de
Clare. If such a grief had happened to herself, she would have wept
incessantly for a week, been low-spirited for a month, and in a year
would have been wreathed with smiles, and arranging her trousseau for a
wedding with another bridegroom. The only thing which could really have
distressed her long, would have been if the vacant place in her life had
_not_ been refilled.

But Margaret's character was of a deeper type. For her the world held
no other man, and life's blossom once blighted, no second crop of
happiness could grow, at least on the same tree. To such a character as
this, the only possibility of throwing out fresh bloom is when the tree
is grafted by the great Husbandman with amaranth from Heaven.

Yet it was not in Margaret's nature--it would have been in her
mother's--to say much of what she felt. Outwardly, she showed no
difference, except that her _coeur leger_ was gone, never to return.
She did not shut herself up and refuse to join in the employments or
amus