As Mary Delaval walked on, and gradually recovered her composure, she reflected somewhat bitterly on her lot, and looked back upon her life with a feeling of discontent, that for a moment seemed almost to upbraid Providence that she had not had a fair chance. It was but for a moment--Mary had been schooled in adversity, and had profited by its lessons. In some situations of life such a temperament as hers might have been prone to grow fastidious and uncharitable. Her ideal of good would have been very high, and she would have looked down with contempt upon the grovelling spirits that constituted the mass of her fellow-creatures. But poverty and dependence had taught her many a lesson, hard to learn, but harder to forget. What had she to do with pride?--a question to be asked, if you contemplated her tall, graceful figure, with its majestic sweep and lofty gestures--her goddess-like head, set on as if the Greek had carved its proportions with his unerring chisel--her dark, deep-set grey eye, with its long lashes, veiling a world of penetration, reflection, ay, and sentiment, for the happy man who could bid it kindle into love--her faultless profile and firm determined mouth, her father’s legacy, with the courage it betokened--her low, lovable brow, with its masses of thick, dark brown hair plainly braided on each side of that pale, haunting face, beautiful in the deep expression which arrives only with the maturity of womanhood; with all this she might have been a queen, yet what had she to do with pride?--a question not to be asked of a friendless, desolate woman, trudging along the streets in the dreary isolation of loneliness in London, wasting her beauty in the strife for bread, wearing her talents threadbare in the drudgery of a daily music-mistress. What a lot if there were nothing beyond! To rise early in that dingy atmosphere--to breakfast hurriedly on such a spare meal as the lady’s-maid next door would deem insufficient for her mistress’s poodle--to leave the dreary lodging for the scarce less dreary street; day after day to make the same round, waiting upon vulgar parents and stupid children--day after day to bend rebellious fingers over the soul-breathing chords--to dissect the harmony of heaven into “one--two--three--four,” “one--two--three--four,”--and day after day to return, wearied out in body and mind, to the solitary room which cannot be called a home, and the rent of which, dear on account of _the situation_, swallows up the hard-earned coins that should decorate and supply its vacuity; with nothing to cheer, nothing to amuse, nothing to console, not even the consciousness of that beauty which is only a cause of annoyance and remark; and, above all, with nothing to love--what a lot would this be, were there not a something to look forward to--a humble hope that this is but a state of trial and probation--a humble confidence that the reward is sure to come at last!