She who blushed before her children, how could she ever look Harry in the face? She felt herself an infidel, trembling and crying over that everlastingness which had once given her such consolation. That Harry could ever cease to love her, nature contradicted as impossible. He was in heaven, far off, unseen, fixed in solemn unchangeableness in all the elevation of love and grief he died in, never to alter; and she?—— Step by step unconsciously that elevation of grief and love had died away from her in the changing human days, and now here she sat weeping, trembling, thinking with awe of Harry, wondering how he would claim her hereafter, how she could dare name his name when she was another man’s wife. Poor little trembling soul! She stole away to bed when she could bear it no longer, and sought refuge in sleep with the tears still in her eyes, some grand and desperate resolution of making a sacrifice of herself being in her mind, as was natural. She had troubled dreams, and woke up quite unrefreshed in the morning, which was very unlucky that day of all others, because the lawyers were coming, and all her business affairs were to be settled before her marriage. However, Mrs Clifford could not remember at her first waking what it was which had thrown such a cloud upon her; and when her thoughts of the previous night did return to her mind, they were neither so intolerable nor so urgent as they had been. In the daylight, somehow, those gates of heaven, at which Harry might be standing to claim her, looked a very far way off to the bride of Tom Summerhayes—there was no such immediate certainty of Harry’s existence anyhow, or of the kind of interest he might take in her proceedings; and the philosophy of the question did not recur to her mind with those puzzling and hopeless speculations. She was a great deal more content to accept the present and to postpone the future—to let hereafter take care of itself—than she had been at night. She put away the desk with Harry’s letters in a dark vacant upper shelf of a bookcase in her own dressing-room; there, where she could not even see it, it would no longer witness against her. It was a sunny morning, and the children came in all fresh and rosy to say their prayers, and there was a note from Mr Summerhayes on the breakfast-table, naming the hour at which the law people were to arrive. Mrs Clifford had recovered her colour and her spirits before they came; she was a little agitated, and looked very pretty in the commotion of her heart. Hers was a position very peculiar and interesting, as Mr Gateshead himself, the old family solicitor, suggested, as he read over the deed she was to sign. He was perfectly pleased with the arrangements altogether, and said that Mr Summerhayes had behaved most honourably and in the most gentlemanly way. It was very clear that _his_ motives were not mercenary. The deed Mrs Clifford had to sign was one by which Fontanel and all its dependencies was settled