ul, for she had visited courts and mixed in polished circles,
but she had fortunately not learnt to affect insensibility as a system,
or to believe that the essence of good breeding consists in showing your
fellow-creatures that you despise them. Her cheerful temper solaced the
constitutional gloom of Sir Ratcliffe, and indeed had originally won his
heart, even more than her remarkable beauty: and while at the same
time she loved a country life, she possessed in a lettered taste, in a
beautiful and highly cultivated voice, and in a scientific knowledge of
music and of painting, all those resources which prevent retirement from
degenerating into loneliness. Her foibles, if we must confess that she
was not faultless, endeared her to her husband, for her temper reflected
his own pride, and she possessed the taste for splendour which was also
his native mood, although circumstances had compelled him to stifle its
gratification.

Love, pure and profound, had alone prompted the union between Ratcliffe
Armine and Constance Grandison Doubtless, like all of her race, she
might have chosen amid the wealthiest of the Catholic nobles and gentry
one who would have been proud to have mingled his life with hers; but,
with a soul not insensible to the splendid accidents of existence, she
yielded her heart to one who could repay the rich sacrifice only with
devotion. His poverty, his pride, his dangerous and hereditary gift of
beauty, his mournful life, his illustrious lineage, his reserved and
romantic mind, had at once attracted her fancy and captivated her heart.
She shared all his aspirations and sympathised with all his hopes; and
the old glory of the house of Armine, and its revival and restoration,
were the object of her daily thoughts, and often of her nightly dreams.

With these feelings Lady Armine settled herself at her new home,
scarcely with a pang that the whole of the park in which she lived was
let out as grazing ground, and only trusting, as she beheld the groups
of ruminating cattle, that the day might yet come for the antlered
tenants of the bowers to resume their shady dwellings. The good man and
his wife who hitherto had inhabited the old Place, and shown the castle
and the pleasaunce to passing travellers, were, under the new order of
affairs, promoted to the respective offices of serving-man and cook,
or butler and housekeeper, as they styled themselves in the village.
A maiden brought from Grandison to wait on La