id coldly. 'Well,
well--my poor uncle!--Yes, I'll go with you, and see you through the
business.'

So they went off together instead of asunder, as planned. It is
unnecessary to record the details of the journey, or of the sad week
which followed it at her father's house. Lord Quantock's seat was a fine
old mansion standing in its own park, and there were plenty of
opportunities for husband and wife either to avoid each other, or to get
reconciled if they were so minded, which one of them was at least.
Captain Northbrook was not present at the reading of the will. She came
to him afterward, and found him packing up his papers, intending to start
next morning, now that he had seen her through the turmoil occasioned by
her father's death.

'He has left me everything that he could!' she said to her husband.
'James, will you forgive me now, and stay?'

'I cannot stay.'

'Why not?'

'I cannot stay,' he repeated.

'But why?'

'I don't like you.'

He acted up to his word. When she came downstairs the next morning she
was told that he had gone.

* * * * *

Laura bore her double bereavement as best she could. The vast mansion in
which she had hitherto lived, with all its historic contents, had gone to
her father's successor in the title; but her own was no unhandsome one.
Around lay the undulating park, studded with trees a dozen times her own
age; beyond it, the wood; beyond the wood, the farms. All this fair and
quiet scene was hers. She nevertheless remained a lonely, repentant,
depressed being, who would have given the greater part of everything she
possessed to ensure the presence and affection of that husband whose very
austerity and phlegm--qualities that had formerly led to the alienation
between them--seemed now to be adorable features in his character.

She hoped and hoped again, but all to no purpose. Captain Northbrook did
not alter his mind and return. He was quite a different sort of man from
one who altered his mind; that she was at last despairingly forced to
admit. And then she left off hoping, and settled down to a mechanical
routine of existence which in some measure dulled her grief; but at the
expense of all her natural animation and the sprightly wilfulness which
had once charmed those who knew her, though it was perhaps all the while
a factor in the production of her unhappiness.

To say that her beauty quite departed as the years rolled on would be to
overstate the truth. Time