afforded her something to talk and think about, and discuss as if it concerned her,—­and yet did not concern her,—­business which could not hurt her if it failed, which would please her if it succeeded.  Her letters, her papers, her books, each coming at its appointed hour, were all instruments of pleasure.  She came down-stairs at a certain hour, which she kept to as if it had been of the utmost importance, although it was of no importance at all:  she took just so much good wine, so many cups of tea.  Her repasts were as regular as clockwork—­never too late, never too early.  Her whole life went on velvet, rolling smoothly along, without jar or interruption, blameless, pleasant, kind.  People talked of her old age as a model of old age, with no bitterness or sourness in it.  And, indeed, why should she have been sour or bitter?  It suited her far better to be kind.  She was in reality kind to everybody, liking to see pleasant faces about her.  The poor had no reason to complain of her; her servants were very comfortable; and the one person in her house who was nearer to her own level, who was her companion and most important minister, was very comfortable too.  This was a young woman about twenty, a very distant relation, with “no claim,” everybody said, upon her kind mistress and friend,—­the daughter of a distant cousin.  How very few think anything at all of such a tie! but Lady Mary had taken her young namesake when she was a child, and she had grown up as it were at her godmother’s footstool, in the conviction that the measured existence of the old was the rule of life, and that her own trifling personality counted for nothing, or next to nothing, in its steady progress.  Her name was Mary too—­always called “little Mary” as having once been little, and not yet very much in the matter of size.  She was one of the pleasantest things to look at of all the pretty things in Lady Mary’s rooms, and she had the most sheltered, peaceful, and pleasant life that could be conceived.  The only little thorn in her pillow was, that whereas in the novels, of which she read a great many, the heroines all go and pay visits and have adventures, she had none, but lived constantly at home.  There was something much more serious in her life, had she known, which was that she had nothing, and no power of doing anything for herself; that she had all her life been accustomed to a modest luxury which would make poverty very hard to her; and that Lady Mary was over eighty, and had made no will.  If she did not make any will, her property would all go to her grandson, who was so rich already that her fortune would be but as a drop in the ocean to him; or to some great-grandchildren of whom she knew very little,—­the descendants of a daughter long ago dead who had married an Austrian, and who were therefore foreigners both in birth and name.  That she should provide for little Mary was therefore a thing which nature demanded, and which would hurt nobody.  She had said so often; but