ar our sympathy grew weaker, while our flesh grew stronger. But we
still spoke low, and our hearts ached whenever we thought of my lady
sitting there alone in the darkened room, with the light ever falling on
that one solemn page.

We wished, O how I wished that she would see Mr. Gray! But Adams said,
she thought my lady ought to have a bishop come to see her. Still no one
had authority enough to send for one.

Mr. Horner all this time was suffering as much as any one. He was too
faithful a servant of the great Hanbury family, though now the family had
dwindled down to a fragile old lady, not to mourn acutely over its
probable extinction. He had, besides, a deeper sympathy and reverence
with, and for, my lady, in all things, than probably he ever cared to
show, for his manners were always measured and cold. He suffered from
sorrow. He also suffered from wrong. My lord's executors kept writing
to him continually. My lady refused to listen to mere business, saying
she intrusted all to him. But the "all" was more complicated than I ever
thoroughly understood. As far as I comprehended the case, it was
something of this kind:--There had been a mortgage raised on my lady's
property of Hanbury, to enable my lord, her husband, to spend money in
cultivating his Scotch estates, after some new fashion that required
capital. As long as my lord, her son, lived, who was to succeed to both
the estates after her death, this did not signify; so she had said and
felt; and she had refused to take any steps to secure the repayment of
capital, or even the payment of the interest of the mortgage from the
possible representatives and possessors of the Scotch estates, to the
possible owner of the Hanbury property; saying it ill became her to
calculate on the contingency of her son's death.

But he had died childless, unmarried. The heir of the Monkshaven
property was an Edinburgh advocate, a far-away kinsman of my lord's: the
Hanbury property, at my lady's death, would go to the descendants of a
third son of the Squire Hanbury in the days of Queen Anne.

This complication of affairs was most grievous to Mr. Horner. He had
always been opposed to the mortgage; had hated the payment of the
interest, as obliging my lady to practise certain economies which, though
she took care to make them as personal as possible, he disliked as
derogatory to the family. Poor Mr. Horner! He was so cold and hard in
his manner, so curt and decisiv