de,
and the tables set, with the usual order and regularity.

And Aspatria found this "habit of living" to be a good staff to lean
upon. She assumed certain duties, and performed them; and the house
was pleasanter for her oversight. Will and Brune came far oftener to
sit at the parlour fireside, when they found Aspatria there to welcome
them. And so the days and weeks followed one another, bringing with
them those commonplace duties and interests which give to existence a
sense of stability and order. No one spoke of Fenwick; but all the
more Aspatria nursed his image in her heart and her imagination. He
had dressed himself for his marriage with great care and splendour.
Never had he looked so handsome and so noble in her eyes, and never
until that hour had she realized her social inferiority to him, her
lack of polish and breeding, her ignorance of all things which a woman
of birth and wealth ought to know and to possess.

This was a humiliating acknowledgment; but it was Aspatria's first
upward step, for with it came an invincible determination to make
herself worthy of her husband's love and companionship. The hope and
the object gave a new colour to her life. As she went about her simple
duties, as she sat alone in her room, as she listened to her brothers
talking, it occupied, strengthened, and inspired her. Dark as the
present was, it held the hope of a future which made her blush and
tingle to its far-off joy. To learn everything, to go everywhere, to
become a brilliant woman, a woman of the world, to make her husband
admire and adore her,--these were the dreams that brightened the long,
sombre winter, and turned the low dim rooms into a palace of
enchantment.

She was aware of the difficulties in her way. She thought first of
asking Will to permit her to go to a school in London. But she knew he
would never consent. She had no friends to whom she could confide her
innocent plans, she had as yet no money in her own control. But in
less than two years she would be of age. Her fortune would then be at
her disposal, and the law would permit her to order her own life. In
the mean time she could read and study at home: when the spring came
she would see the vicar, and he would lend her books from his library.
There was an Encyclopaedia in the house; she got together its scattered
volumes, and began to make herself familiar with its _melange_ of
information.

In such efforts her heart was purified from all bittern