, "It
is because she looks so good."

But this was after ten years and more. Of the first half of those years
the less that is said, the better. She did not live; she merely endured
life. Monotony without, a constant aching within--a restless gnawing
want, a perpetual expectation, half hope, half fear; no human being could
bear all this without being the worse for it, or the better. But the
betterness came afterward, not first.

Sometimes her cravings to hear the smallest tidings of him, only if he
were alive or dead, grew into such an agony that, had it not been for
her entire helplessness in the matter, she might have tried some means
of gaining information. But from his sudden change of plans, she was
ignorant even of the name of the ship he had sailed by, the firm he had
gone to. She could do absolutely nothing, and learn nothing. Here was
something like the "Affliction of Margaret," that poem of Wordsworth's
which, when her little pupils recited it--as they often did--made her
ready to sob out loud from the pang of its piteous reality:

"I look for ghosts, but none will force
Their way to me: 'tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Betwixt the living and the dead:
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night
With love and longings infinite."

Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead;
for her finger was still empty of that ring--her mother's ring--which he
had drawn off, promising its return "when he was dead or she was
married." This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her. Nor,
indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her,
these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscure
village in the south of England, where she had lived as governess--first
in the squire's family, then the rector's.

From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped to
remain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a few
months. At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son had
returned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone back
again to India. There was now, for the first time for half a century,
not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.

But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city,
her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with a
persistency for which her conscience