proposal.  She read well:  she gave the due emphasis; but had any one asked her, when she had ended, the meaning of what she had been reading, she could not have told.  She was smitten with a feeling of ingratitude to Mr. Thornton, inasmuch as, in the morning, she had refused to accept the kindness he had shown her in making further inquiry from the medical men, so as to obviate any inquest being held.  Oh! she was grateful!  She had been cowardly and false, and had shown her cowardliness and falsehood in action that could not be recalled; but she was not ungrateful.  It sent a glow to her heart, to know how she could feel towards one who had reason to despise her.  His cause for contempt was so just, that she should have respected him less if she had thought he did not feel contempt.  It was a pleasure to feel how thoroughly she respected him.  He could not prevent her doing that; it was the one comfort in all this misery.

Late in the evening, the expected book arrived, ’with Mr. Thornton’s kind regards, and wishes to know how Mr. Hale is.’

‘Say that I am much better, Dixon, but that Miss Hale—­’

‘No, papa,’ said Margaret, eagerly—­’don’t say anything about me.  He does not ask.’

‘My dear child, how you are shivering!’ said her father, a few minutes afterwards.  ’You must go to bed directly.  You have turned quite pale!’

Margaret did not refuse to go, though she was loth to leave her father alone.  She needed the relief of solitude after a day of busy thinking, and busier repenting.

But she seemed much as usual the next day; the lingering gravity and sadness, and the occasional absence of mind, were not unnatural symptoms in the early days of grief And almost in proportion to her re-establishment in health, was her father’s relapse into his abstracted musing upon the wife he had lost, and the past era in his life that was closed to him for ever.

CHAPTER XXXVI

UNION NOT ALWAYS STRENGTH

’The steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
The sobs of the mourners, deep and low.’ 
Shelley.

At the time arranged the previous day, they set out on their walk to see Nicholas Higgins and his daughter.  They both were reminded of their recent loss, by a strange kind of shyness in their new habiliments, and in the fact that it was the first time, for many weeks, that they had deliberately gone out together.  They drew very close to each other in unspoken sympathy.

Nicholas was sitting by the fire-side in his accustomed corner:  but he had not his accustomed pipe.  He was leaning his head upon his hand, his arm resting on his knee.  He did not get up when he saw them, though Margaret could read the welcome in his eye.

‘Sit ye down, sit ye down.  Fire’s welly out,’ said he, giving it a vigorous poke, as if to turn attention away from himself.  He was rather disorderly, to be sure, with a black unshaven beard of several days’ growth, making his pale face look yet paler, and a jacket which would have been all the better for patching.