ise in the social ladder, Mrs. Travers was
seized with congestion of the lungs followed by pleurisy, and died after
less than a week's illness. Leopold never wholly recovered her loss.
Though still young and always handsome, the idea of another wife, the
love of another woman, were notions which he dismissed from his, mind
with a quiet scorn. He was too masculine a creature to parade grief.
For some weeks, indeed, he shut himself up in his own room, so rigidly
secluded that he would not see even his daughter. But one morning he
appeared in his fields as usual, and from that day resumed his old
habits, and gradually renewed that cordial interchange of hospitalities
which had popularly distinguished him since his accession to wealth.
Still people felt that the man was changed; he was more taciturn,
more grave: if always just in his dealings, he took the harder side of
justice, where in his wife's time he had taken the gentler. Perhaps, to
a man of strong will, the habitual intercourse with an amiable woman is
essential for those occasions in which Will best proves the fineness of
its temper by the facility with which it can be bent.

It may be said that Leopold Travers might have found such intercourse in
the intimate companionship of his own daughter. But she was a mere child
when his wife died, and she grew up to womanhood too insensibly for
him to note the change. Besides, where a man has found a wife his
all-in-all, a daughter can never supply her place. The very reverence
due to children precludes unrestrained confidence; and there is not
that sense of permanent fellowship in a daughter which a man has in a
wife,--any day a stranger may appear and carry her off from him. At all
events Leopold did not own in Cecilia the softening influence to
which he had yielded in her mother. He was fond of her, proud of her,
indulgent to her; but the indulgence had its set limits. Whatever she
asked solely for herself he granted; whatever she wished for matters
under feminine control--the domestic household, the parish school, the
alms-receiving poor--obtained his gentlest consideration. But when she
had been solicited by some offending out-of-door dependant or some petty
defaulting tenant to use her good offices in favour of the culprit, Mr.
Travers checked her interference by a firm "No," though uttered in a
mild accent, and accompanied with a masculine aphorism to the effect
that "there would be no such things as strict justice a