be said
of her, that she had come so late in life to whatever of ripeness was
to be vouchsafed to her, that perhaps the period of her thraldom had
not terminated itself a day too soon for her advantage. Many of her
youthful verses she had destroyed in the packing up of those two
modest trunks; but there were effusions of the spirit which had
flown into rhyme within the last twelve months, and which she still
preserved. Since her brother's death she had confined herself to
simple prose, and for this purpose she kept an ample journal. All
this is mentioned to show that at the age of thirty-six Margaret
Mackenzie was still a young woman.

She had resolved that she would not content herself with a lifeless
life, such as those few who knew anything of her evidently expected
from her. Harry Handcock had thought to make her his head nurse; and
the Tom Mackenzies had also indulged some such idea when they gave
her that first invitation to come and live in Gower Street. A word
or two had been said at the Cedars which led her to suppose that
the baronet's family there would have admitted her, with her eight
hundred a year, had she chosen to be so admitted. But she had
declared to herself that she would make a struggle to do better with
herself and with her money than that. She would go into the world,
and see if she could find any of those pleasantnesses of which she
had read in books. As for dancing, she was too old, and never yet
in her life had she stood up as a worshipper of Terpsichore. Of
cards she knew nothing; she had never even seen them used. To the
performance of plays she had been once or twice in her early days,
and now regarded a theatre not as a sink of wickedness after the
manner of the Stumfoldians, but as a place of danger because of
difficulty of ingress and egress, because the ways of a theatre were
far beyond her ken. The very mode in which it would behove her to
dress herself to go out to an ordinary dinner party, was almost
unknown to her. And yet, in spite of all this, she was resolved to
try.

Would it not have been easier for her--easier and more
comfortable--to have abandoned all ideas of the world, and have put
herself at once under the tutelage and protection of some clergyman
who would have told her how to give away her money, and prepare
herself in the right way for a comfortable death-bed? There was much
in this view of life to recommend it. It would be very easy, and
she had the necessary fai