Lady Lodore was obliged also to consider one other thing, which forms so large a portion of our meditations in real life--her purse. She found when settled in the cottage, in the Vale of Bewling, that her stock of money was reduced to one hundred pounds. She could not cross the country and establish herself at a distance from London with this sum only. She had before looked forward to selling her jewels and carriage as to a distant event, but now she felt that it was the _next_ thing she must do. She shrunk from it naturally: the very idea of revisiting London--of seeing its busy shops and streets--once so full of life and its purposes to her, and in which she would now wander an alien, was inconceivably saddening; she was willing to put off the necessity as long as possible, and thus continued to procrastinate her departure from Essex. Mrs. Fitzhenry returned; but she could neither know nor dream of the vicinity of her sister-in-law. We are apt to think, when we know nothing of any one, that no one knows any thing of us; experience can scarcely teach us, that the reverse of this is often the truth. Seeing only an old woman in her dotage--and a poor love-sick girl, who knew nothing beyond the one event which had blasted all her happiness--she never heard the inhabitants of Longfield mentioned, and believed that she was equally unheard of by them. Then her indisposition protracted her stay, and now the mortal illness of the poor woman. For she had become interested for Margaret and promised to befriend her; and in case of her grandmother's death, to take her from a spot where every association and appearance kept open the wounds inflicted by her unfaithful lover. Time had thus passed on: now sad, now cheerful, she tried to banish every thought of the future, and to make the occurrences of each day fill and satisfy her mind. She lived obscurely and humbly, and perhaps as wisely as mortal may in this mysterious world, where hope is perpetually followed by disappointment, and action by repentance and regret. The days succeeded to each other in one unvaried tenor. The weather was cheerful, the breath of spring animating. She watched the swelling of the buds--the peeping heads of the crocuses--the opening of the anemones and wild wind-flowers, and at last, the sweet odour of the new-born violets, with all the interest created by novelty; not that she had not observed and watched these things before, with transitory pleasure, but now the operations of nature filled all her world; the earth was no longer merely the dwelling place of her acquaintance, the stage on which the business of society was carried on, but the mother of life--the temple of God--the beautiful and varied store-house of bounteous nature.