“I am sure you would, my dear,” said Mr. Langford, “and she deserves it.  There are few like her, and few that have gone through so much.  To think of her as she was when last she was here and to look at her now!  Well, it won’t do to talk of it; but I thought when I saw her face yesterday, that I could see, as well as believe, it was all for the best for her, as I am sure it was for us.”

He was interrupted just as they reached the gate by the voice of his eldest son calling “Out late, sir,” and looking round, Henrietta saw what looked in the darkness like a long procession, Uncle and Aunt Roger, and their niece, and all the boys, as far down as William, coming to the Hall for the regular Christmas dinner-party.

Joining company, Henrietta walked with Jessie and answered her inquiries whether she had got wet or cold in the morning; but it was in an absent manner, for she was all the time dwelling on what her grandfather had been saying.  She was calling up in imagination the bright scenes of her mother’s youth; those delightful games of which she had often heard, and which she could place in their appropriate setting now that she knew the scenes.  She ran up to her room, where she found only Bennet, her mother having dressed and gone down; and sitting down before the fire, and resigning her curls to her maid, she let herself dwell on the ideas the conversation had called up, turning from the bright to the darker side.  She pictured to herself the church, the open grave, her uncles and her grandfather round it, the villagers taking part in their grief, the old carpenter’s averted head--she thought what must have been the agony of the moment, of laying in his untimely grave one so fondly loved, on whom the world was just opening so brightly,—­and the young wife—­the infant children—­how fearful it must have been!  “It was almost a cruel dispensation,” thought Henrietta.  “O, how happy and bright we might have been!  What would it not have been to hold by his hand, to have his kiss, to look for his smile!  And mamma, to have had her in all her joyousness and blitheness, with no ill health, and no cares!  O, why was it not so?  And yet grandpapa said it was for the best!  And in what a manner he did say it, as if he really felt and saw, and knew the advantage of it!  To dear papa himself I know it was for the best, but for us, mamma, grandpapa—­no, I never shall understand it.  They were good before; why did they need punishment?  Is this what is called saying ’Thy will be done?’ Then I shall never be able to say it, and yet I ought!”

“Your head a little higher, if you please, Miss Henrietta,” said Bennet; “it is that makes me so long dressing you, and your mamma has been telling me that I must get you ready faster.”

Henrietta slightly raised her head for the moment, but soon let it sink again in her musings, and when Bennet reminded her, replied, “I can’t, Bennet, it breaks my neck.”  Her will was not with her mother’s, in a trifling matter of which the reasonableness could not but approve itself to her.  How, then, was it likely to be bent to that of her Heavenly Parent, in what is above reason?