As for Lilias, she did not want anything to take off her thoughts. For three months nearly she cultivated everything that could make her think of him, and keep up the sombre current. She retired to her own room, and would stay there for hours, weeping, and keeping herself in the atmosphere of affliction. At the end of that time the monotony of sorrow began to press severely upon her young mind, and she was glad to take to her lessons for a change; and thus gradually it came about that she grew light-hearted again by unnoticed stages. When she thought of dear papa now, it was sometimes with a little guilty sense that she had forgotten him, partly with a half-fictitious representation to herself that it was "far better" for him. Perhaps, indeed, it was so: but few of us are fully able to believe that death is an advantage. And it was very hard to realize that it would be an advantage to the general. He had liked his life in Murkley so much; everything (except the want of the money) had suited him so well. He liked his newspaper, his fishing when the weather permitted, his old friends, his native place. To think of him as denuded of all these things, and living under such different conditions, was dreadfully difficult. And it seemed hard upon him to be shut out of the house of his fathers so long, and to have so short a time to enjoy it in--to be Sir George only for a year, just to be permitted to take possession, to settle down: and then in a moment to have to resign it all for a condition in which he would no longer be Sir George, or derive any gratification from the possession of Murkley. But such thoughts as these were not the sort of thoughts that she ought to entertain, Lilias knew.