er legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar
had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as
it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he
was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope's open
adjurations that he should "do something," to declare that there was no
pretext for questioning the validity of the document.

To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife's
confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date
showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to
have lost all influence over her--on the morrow of the day when she had
stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills,
and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.

While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other;
and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in
so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and
hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that
searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel
when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But
Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told
him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done
his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of
the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of
the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him
take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and
not against her.

Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed
old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only
thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for
had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in
fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so
tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the
sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the
wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills
were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own
right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify
his wife's trust in him.

Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had
handed her, smiled a