At this juncture Miss Hope dropped her eye-glass once again, and, turning to Heather, said: “Yes, my dear, it is clear as noonday (noonday anywhere out of England), that on the young lady’s part it is a marriage of convenience. How shocked you look! Where have your eyes been not to find out the real state of matters for yourself? I suspected it at the first glance; but then, you and I are two very different people; you are the stupidest, simplest goose I ever had the happiness of meeting.” And the old lady laid her hand on her niece’s shoulder with a not unkindly gesture. Wise old ladies occasionally take fancies to such stupid, simple young geese as Heather Dudley; and Miss Hope, who knew Arthur better, perhaps, than anybody in the world, felt sorry for the wife, whose lot, it was impossible for her to avoid seeing, had not been cast in pleasant places. But what, you may ask, did that matter, if Heather herself were unconscious of the fact? My reader, do you think the blind man, born blind, can yet remain ignorant for ever that others are able to look on the blue heavens and the green earth? Do you think the mute comes in due time to have no comprehension that his fellows enjoy a gift withheld from him? Do you imagine the deaf have no understanding of all which has been denied to them? Do you suppose the childless never listen for the sound of little feet that God has decreed shall patter across no floor towards their arms outstretched to greet them? Do you believe the spinster never considers what her lot might have been, when she looks around and sees other women happily married, and sitting by no lonely fires, as she is doomed to do, through the years, the long, solitary, uneventful years? Do you not understand that in due time the eye must behold, and the heart long—that the fruit eaten so many thousand years ago by our common mother, _must_ be tasted sooner or later in its bitterness by all who are born of woman, and who would attain to the full stature of man? On the branches of the tree still hangs that which gives knowledge of good and evil; and till the hand have grasped, and the mind received, no life can be called perfect, no human being become as a god, comprehending, not merely the mystery of good and evil, but also all the joy and all the sorrow which that mystery involves. CHAPTER VIII. IN HEATHER’S DRESSING-ROOM. Taken as a whole, the incongruous ingredients brought together at Berrie Down Hollow did not form a peculiarly agreeable social dish. In one respect it might have been called a kind of haggis, but the result proved that what may be made palatable in cookery, cannot always be tried domestically.