cases, sealing the lips,
interdicting utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation--a
dissimulation often wearing an easy and gay mien at first, settling down
to sorrow and paleness in time, then passing away, and leaving a
convenient stoicism, not the less fortifying because it is half-bitter.

Half-bitter! Is that wrong? No; it should be bitter: bitterness is
strength--it is a tonic. Sweet, mild force following acute suffering you
find nowhere; to talk of it is delusion. There may be apathetic
exhaustion after the rack. If energy remains, it will be rather a
dangerous energy--deadly when confronted with injustice.

Who has read the ballad of "Puir Mary Lee"--that old Scotch ballad,
written I know not in what generation nor by what hand? Mary had been
ill-used--probably in being made to believe that truth which was
falsehood. She is not complaining, but she is sitting alone in the
snowstorm, and you hear her thoughts. They are not the thoughts of a
model heroine under her circumstances, but they are those of a
deeply-feeling, strongly-resentful peasant-girl. Anguish has driven her
from the ingle-nook of home to the white-shrouded and icy hills.
Crouched under the "cauld drift," she recalls every image of
horror--"the yellow-wymed ask," "the hairy adder," "the auld moon-bowing
tyke," "the ghaist at e'en,", "the sour bullister," "the milk on the
taed's back." She hates these, but "waur she hates Robin-a-Ree."

"Oh, ance I lived happily by yon bonny burn--
The warld was in love wi' me;
But now I maun sit 'neath the cauld drift and mourn,
And curse black Robin-a-Ree!

"Then whudder awa, thou bitter biting blast,
And sough through the scrunty tree,
And smoor me up in the snaw fu' fast,
And n'er let the sun me see!

"Oh, never melt awa, thou wreath o' snaw,
That's sae kind in graving me;
But hide me frae the scorn and guffaw
O' villains like Robin-a-Ree!"

But what has been said in the last page or two is not germane to
Caroline Helstone's feelings, or to the state of things between her and
Robert Moore. Robert had done her no wrong; he had told her no lie; it
was she that was to blame, if any one was. What bitterness her mind
distilled should and would be poured on her own head. She had loved
without being asked to love--a natural, sometimes an inevitable chance,
but big with misery.

Robert, indeed, had sometimes seemed to be fond of her; but