ind in general, kind to those whose claims were
undeniable. He replied with a swelling heart, "There must always be
individuals who divine, though perhaps they may not dare to show their
sympathy,--ah, don't say pity, Lady Markland!"

"You humour me," she said, "because you know I love to talk. But pity is
very sweet; there is a balm in it to those who are wounded."

"Sympathy is better.

"'Mighty love would cleave in twain
The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.'"

"Ah," she cried, with a glimmer in her eyes, "if you go to the poets,
Mr. Warrender! And that is more than sympathy. What did he call it
himself? 'Such a friendship as had mastered time.'"

"Mamma, mamma, look here!" came in advance of his appearance the voice
of Geoff. He came panting, flying round the other angle of the terrace,
with his arms full of books. And here, as if it were a type of all that
was coming, the higher intercourse, the exchange of thought, the
promotion of the man over the child, came suddenly to an end.

CHAPTER XVII.

Lady Markland had recovered in a great degree from the shock of her
husband's death. It had been, as Mrs. Warrender said, a shock rather
than a sorrow. There is no such reconciler of those who have been
severed, no such softener of the wounds which people closely connected
in life so often give to each other, as death. A long illness ending
so has often the effect of blotting out altogether the wrongs and
bitternesses of many troubled years. The unkind husband becomes once
more a hero, the child who has stung its parents to the quick a young
and tender saint, by that blessed process. Nor when death comes in a
moment is it of less avail. The horror, the pity, the intolerable pang
of sympathy, with which we realise what the sudden end must have been to
him who met it, without time to think, without time to repent, without
a moment to prepare himself for that incalculable change, affects every
mind, even that of the merest spectator; how much more that of one whom
the victim had left a few hours before with a careless word, perhaps an
insult, perhaps a jest! What changes of mood, what revelations, what
sudden adaptation to the supreme necessity, may come with the blow, the
spectator, even if he be nearest and dearest to the sufferer, cannot
know. He knows only what was and is, and his soul is overwhelmed with
pity. In that moment those who are most deeply injured forgive and