then
stay in the house of death until she could feel assured that all else
were hushed into prudence. Ay, she felt, that with due precautions, the
name was still safe. And so she awed and hurried Mark and his wife away,
and went with them in the covered cart, that hid the faces of all three,
leaving for an hour or two the house and the dead to her husband's
charge, with many an admonition, to which he nodded his head, and which
he did not hear. Do you think this woman was unfeeling and inhuman?
Had Nora looked from heaven into her mother's heart Nora would not have
thought so. A good name when the burial stone closes over dust is still
a possession upon the earth; on earth it is indeed our only one! Better
for our friends to guard for us that treasure than to sit down and weep
over perishable clay. And weep!--Oh, stern mother, long years were left
to thee for weeping! No tears shed for Nora made such deep furrows on
the cheeks as thine did! Yet who ever saw them flow?

Harley was in great surprise to see Egerton; more surprised when Egerton
told him that he found he was to be opposed,--that he had no chance of
success at Lansmere, and had, therefore, resolved to retire from the
contest. He wrote to the earl to that effect; but the countess knew
the true cause, and hinted it to the earl; so that, as we saw at the
commencement of this history, Egerton's cause did not suffer when
Captain Dashmore appeared in the borough; and, thanks to Mr. Hazeldean's
exertions and oratory, Audley came in by two votes,--the votes of John
Avenel and Mark Fairfield. For though the former had been removed a
little way from the town, and by medical advice, and though, on other
matters, the disease that had smitten him left him docile as a child
(and he had but vague indistinct ideas of all the circumstances
connected with Nora's return, save the sense of her loss), yet he still
would hear how the Blues went on, and would get out of bed to keep his
word: and even his wife said,

"He is right; better die of it than break his promise!" The crowd gave
way as the broken man they had seen a few days before so jovial and
healthful was brought up in a chair to the poll, and said, with his
tremulous quavering voice, "I 'm a true Blue,--Blue forever!"

Elections are wondrous things! No man who has not seen can guess how the
zeal in them triumphs over sickness, sorrow, the ordinary private life
of us!

There was forwarded to Audley, from Lansmere Par