onumental angel; but the clergyman was preferred for his
office's sake--that office probably investing him with some of the
illusion necessary to allure to the commission of matrimony, and which
Miss Cave did not find in any of the young wool-staplers, her other
adorers. Mr. Helstone neither had, nor professed to have, Mr. Yorke's
absorbing passion for her. He had none of the humble reverence which
seemed to subdue most of her suitors; he saw her more as she really was
than the rest did. He was, consequently, more master of her and himself.
She accepted him at the first offer, and they were married.

Nature never intended Mr. Helstone to make a very good husband,
especially to a quiet wife. He thought so long as a woman was silent
nothing ailed her, and she wanted nothing. If she did not complain of
solitude, solitude, however continued, could not be irksome to her. If
she did not talk and put herself forward, express a partiality for this,
an aversion to that, she had no partialities or aversions, and it was
useless to consult her tastes. He made no pretence of comprehending
women, or comparing them with men. They were a different, probably a
very inferior, order of existence. A wife could not be her husband's
companion, much less his confidante, much less his stay. _His_ wife,
after a year or two, was of no great importance to him in any shape; and
when she one day, as he thought, suddenly--for he had scarcely noticed
her decline--but, as others thought, gradually, took her leave of him
and of life, and there was only a still, beautiful-featured mould of
clay left, cold and white, in the conjugal couch, he felt his
bereavement--who shall say how little? Yet, perhaps, more than he seemed
to feel it; for he was not a man from whom grief easily wrung tears.

His dry-eyed and sober mourning scandalized an old housekeeper, and
likewise a female attendant, who had waited upon Mrs. Helstone in her
sickness, and who, perhaps, had had opportunities of learning more of
the deceased lady's nature, of her capacity for feeling and loving, than
her husband knew. They gossiped together over the corpse, related
anecdotes, with embellishments of her lingering decline, and its real or
supposed cause. In short, they worked each other up to some indignation
against the austere little man, who sat examining papers in an adjoining
room, unconscious of what opprobrium he was the object.

Mrs. Helstone was hardly under the sod when rumours