s an excuse
for solitude, and went off to the fells. Mrs. Sandal was crying with
exhaustion, and was easily persuaded to go to her room, and sleep. Then
Charlotte called the servants, men and women, and removed every trace of
the ceremony, and all that was unusual or extravagant. She set the
simplest of meals; she managed in some way, without a word, to give the
worried squire the assurance that all the folly and waste and hurryment
were over for ever; and that his life was to fall back into a calm,
regular, economical groove.

He drank his tea and smoked his pipe to this sense, and was happier than
he had been for many a week.

"It is a middling good thing, Alice," he said, "that we have only one
more daughter to marry. I should think a matter of three or four would
ruin or kill a man, let alone a mother. Eh? What?"

"That is the blessed truth, William. And yet it is the pride of my heart
to say that there never was such a bride or such a bridal in Sandal-Side
before. Still, I am tired, and I feel just as if I had had a trouble.
Come day, go day; at the long end, life is no better than the preacher
called it--_vanity_."

"To be sure it is not. We laugh at a wedding, we cry at a burying, a
christening brings us a feast. On the Sabbath we say our litany; and as
for the rest of the year, one day marrows another."

"Well, well, William Sandal! Maybe we will both feel better after a
night's sleep. To-morrow is untouched."

And the squire, looking into her pale, placid face, had not the heart to
speak out his thought, which was, "Nay, nay; we have mortgaged
to-morrow. Debt and fear, and the penalties of over-work and over-eating
and over-feeling, will be dogging us for their dues by dayshine."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ENEMY IN THE HOUSEHOLD.

"There is a method in man's wickedness,
It grows up by degrees."

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!"

After the wedding, there were some weeks of that peaceful monotony which
is the happiest vehicle for daily life,--weeks so uniform that Charlotte
remembered their events as little as she did their particular weather.
The only circumstance that cast any shadow over them related to Harry.
His behavior had been somewhat remarkable, and the hope that time would
explain it had not been realized at the end of August.

About three weeks before Sophia's marriage, Harry suddenly wrote to say
that he had obtained a three