When Harry was fairly off the scene, his rival slackened in his attentions; and after a while Margaret returned to her brother, and they did their best to retrieve their standing at Tottenham’s, and to make the position of the doctor’s family at Harbour Green a pleasant one. But Lady Mary, superior to ordinary prejudices as she was, was not so superior as to be altogether just to Margaret, who, though she deserved blame, got more blame than she deserved. The Thornleighs all believed that she had “laid herself out” to “entrap” Harry--which was not the case; and Lady Mary looked coldly upon the woman who had permitted herself to be loved by a man so far above her sphere. And then Lady Mary disliked the doctor, who never could think even of the most interesting “case” so much as to be indifferent to what people were thinking of himself. So Harbour Green proved unsuccessful, as their other experiments had proved, and the brother and sister drifted off again into the world, where they drift still, from place to place, always needy, anxious, afraid of their gentility, yet with that link of fraternal love between them, and with that toleration of each other and mutual support, which gives a certain beauty, wherever they go, to the family group formed by this handsome brother and sister, and the beautiful child, whom her uncle cherishes almost as dearly as her mother does. Ah, me! if Margaret had made that “good match,” though it was not all for love, would it not have been better for everybody concerned? CHAPTER XXII. Another Winding-up. I hope it will not give the reader a poor idea of Edgar’s heart if I say that it was with a relief which it was impossible to exaggerate that he felt the last dreary day of darkness pass, and was liberated from his melancholy duties. This did not affect his sorrow for the noble old woman who had made him at once her confidant and her inheritor--inheritor not of land or wealth, but of something more subtle and less tangible. But indeed for her there was no sorrow needed. Out of perennial disappointments she had gone to her kind, to those with whom she could no longer be disappointed. Heaven had been “but a step” to her, which she took smiling. For her the hearse, the black funeral, the nodding plumes, were inappropriate enough; but they pleased the family, of whom it never could be said by any detractor that they had not paid to their mother “every respect.”