t kind of pleasure by
this time. I hope her sister may have a happier lot: it must be horridly
provoking to be a duchess and unhappy," said Miss Robertson.

"'Provoking' is hardly the word for the situation, I think," said Mary.

"To seem to have a thing and not to have it is very provoking," Miss
Robertson said; "besides, other people may hope for some turn of affairs
that will make things better, but what can she hope for? Why, she has
everything this world can give."

"Her case seems a very sad one--all glitter and no gold," Miss Brunton
said.

IV.

Dr. Brunton had been attending an old woman who kept one of the gates of
the castle-grounds and lived in the lodge. It was the least frequented
of all the entrances to the castle, and the least important. The gate
was rustic, and the lodge was rustic and thatched, and looked like a big
beehive, standing as it did at the corner of a fir plantation, the trees
coming up almost to its walls and overshadowing it entirely. It seemed
an eerie, solitary place for one lone woman to inhabit, but she had been
there for many years, and, whatever she had or wanted, time had come and
time had gone. It was a place where you might have thought Death would
have called early any day if he was passing, in case he might forget it
altogether; but he had not, and not only did he not forget it, but he
had come to this house months ago, and hovered about since as if he had
nothing to do elsewhere, or as if he could not have despatched his
business in a moment. At this very time he was seizing some of the great
ones of the earth with little ceremony, for rank and wealth can't keep
him waiting in an anteroom till they are ready to receive him: if they
could, he might get leave to wait long enough. How was it worth his
while to look in on this poor woman every night and show her his face as
king of terrors, and yet hang back from enforcing his rights?

Another elderly woman, lonely like herself, had been got to wait on her.
Women of this kind are not scarce: as life closes in on them they drift
away into little remote houses in the country, or into single rooms up
three or four stairs in towns, like the leaves of autumn that have had
their spring and summer, and are only waiting for the kindly mother
earth to absorb them again. It looks but a dreary last chapter in their
lives, yet it may not be so. In one such instance, at least, which had
been utterly obscure and unknown but that it stood