Her sister died very young, and she scarcely felt her loss; but, when, subsequently, the vicissitudes of a military life had deprived her for ever of her beloved brothers, her melancholy increased.  It was, however, the silent, tearless melancholy, that knows not the paroxysm of outrageous grief.  The quiet resignation of her character formed an obstacle to the inroads of all vivacious sorrow; yet was her health not the less effectually undermined by the slow action of her innate feeling, unfortunately too much fostered by outward influences.  By her marriage and the birth of her sons, whom she loved with all a mother’s fondness, her mental malady had been materially diminished, and indeed, in a great degree superseded, but, unhappily previous to these events, it had seriously affected her constitution, and produced a morbid susceptibility of mind and person, that exposed her to be overwhelmed by the occurrence of any of those afflictions which, otherwise, she might, with ordinary fortitude, have endured.  When, therefore, intelligence from England announced that her parents had both perished in a hurricane on their route to the West Indies, whither the regiment of Colonel De Haldimar had been ordered, the shock was too great for her, mentally and personally enfeebled as she had been, to sustain, and she sank gradually under this final infliction of Providence.

Major Grantham beheld with dismay the effect of this blow upon his beloved wife.  Fell consumption had now marked her for his own, and so rapid was the progress of the disease acting on a temperament already too much pre-disposed to its influence, that, in despite of all human preventives, the sensitive Isabella, before six months had elapsed, was summoned to a better world.

And never did human being meet the summons with more perfect resignation to the Divine will.  The death-bed scene between that tender mother and her sorrowing family, was one which might have edified even the most pious.  Gerald, as we have already said, was in his twelfth year at the period of this afflicting event—­his brother Henry, one year younger; both were summoned from school on the morning of her death—­both knew that their fond mother was ill—­but so far were they from imagining the scene about to be offered to their young observation, that when they reached home it was with the joyous feeling of boys, exulting in a momentary liberation from scholastic restraint, and eagerly turning into holiday, that which they little deemed would so soon become a day of mourning.  How rapidly was the deceitful illusion dispelled, when, on entering the sick chamber of their adored parent, they beheld what every surrounding circumstance told them was not the mere bed of sickness, but the bed of death.  Propped on pillows that supported her feeble head—­her beautiful black hair streaming across her pallid, placid brow, and her countenance wearing a holy and religious calm, Mrs. Grantham presented an image of resignation,