His family consisted of Lady Venniker, two sons, the elder Harry, whose full Christian name was Henry Alfred Brabazon, and a younger boy, now six years old, and the daughter Etheldreda, or, as she was always called, Ethel, whose portrait has been already mentioned as adorning (along with the stag’s head and other trophies) the wall of her brother’s study at St. Anselm’s. If Lord Venniker’s influence was visible everywhere, as, indeed, I think it was, in the village of Helmsbury, it was the influence of his wife that gave charm and character to the home. Lady Venniker was one of those rare beings who seem born to diffuse happiness without knowing it. It would have surprised her to be told that she did good; she would have said that her ill-health, limiting her activities, made it impossible. But she did good in the only way in which it is sure to be done--by being good. Her personal beauty, marked as it was with that wonderfully sanctifying transparency which nothing but congenital delicacy can impart, was irradiated by the light of virtue. There are some faces, women’s faces especially, that excite an unwilling admiration; we look at them, and look again, but we do not care to remember them. Other faces there are--not so beautiful, perhaps, theoretically--that linger as sweet memories in the mind and heart. Lady Venniker’s was a beauty, not of feature only, but of expression. Though she was generally confined to her couch, yet her interest in her family and household and in her neighbours never failed. No word of complaining, no word even of recognising her own sufferings, escaped her lips. Her thought was for others, not for herself. It was not without reason that the villagers, who seldom saw her unless illness or misfortune drew them to her side, would speak of her as ‘the good lady.’ But upon no one was Lady Venniker’s sweet influence felt so powerfully as upon her husband. He had loved her when she was a girl of seventeen, the only daughter of a country gentleman in the same county, and as a lover he loved her still. Time had wrought no change or lessening of his affection. Between him and her no cloud had ever spread. Her pleasure was the law of his life. She did not bend him to her will; he did not need to be bent. Abrupt and imperious as he was at times in his dealing with others, it seemed as if his manner were softened and his voice subdued when he came into her presence. There are marriages which preserve to the end the dream--who will dare to call it a delusion?--of the wedding morning, and such had been his. In his eyes she was still the same as when he had seen and loved her sixteen years before. She was still the same when she died. She has long been dead now; but the villagers of Helmsbury, some of whom never saw her, still speak of ‘the good lady.’ No one so good, no one so beautiful, has been known to them since.