How much of her happiness, during the early years of her married experience, she owed to that young life, Mrs. Dudley never stopped to analyze; but there were those who knew that Berrie Down would have been a terrible home for Arthur’s wife, had bright faces not grown brighter at her approach, had strong willing hands not been stretched out to smooth her way, to make her difficult path easy. She would have found out all her husband’s faults in six months, had she been thrown solely on his society during that period; as it was, she had always something else to think about—something to step between her and knowledge. She was sorry for him, and she was sorry for the “children,” as she called them. It was hard for him, and it was hard for them; and the dear hands were always laid entreatingly on some half-turned pettish shoulder, and the dear voice was ever engaged in soothing the effect of sharp and hasty words; for Heather Dudley was essentially a peace-maker, a woman whose mission it seemed to turn away wrath, to bind up bleeding wounds, to assuage with ointment the irritation of long-standing sores. With Heather no man quarrelled, and no woman either. She was not a good hater; she had never sounded the depths of a great sorrow, nor of a great passion. Like many women who marry very young, even love had come to her mildly. The disease taken in youth, is never so fierce as that which attacks the patient in maturity; as is the strength, so is the day; as are the years, so is the joy and the agony. She was wooed and married! Smoother never ran the course of true love. On neither side was there one to interpose an obstacle, or to prevent either following the road inclination pointed out. She was a woman “without a story,” without any previous attachment—without a wrong, a grief, a remorse, a regret. Crime was to her an awful and abstract mystery, which existed only in the police-reports, and as a secret, low-whispered in some unhappy families. Of the world, she knew nothing: of its wickedness, of its temptations, of its pleasures, of its sorrows, she was innocent as her own children. She had plumbed the depth of no human joy or grief. Through the meadows the rivulet of her life had flowed peacefully and monotonously. Vaguely she understood that there were different existences, that there were other lands, through which swept rivers, broad and deep and dark, in the depths whereof lay wrecked hopes and terrible memories; she had heard of existences lost on those great streams, of corpses which the currents carried down to the vast ocean; she vaguely comprehended that there were rapids and pools, contrary currents, cruel storms to be encountered by some human ships, but it was all vague to her—vague as the story in a book.