nor anyone, nor any place; her work in the world seemed accomplished. She had no longer anything to do for her family whom she had served with loyal devotion for so long. She had been their servant, and yet in a certain sense their mistress; but the duties of both offices were over. She was cast adrift; look where she might, she saw in the blank world before her nothing more to be done, which in any way resembled the office she had filled all her life. The only charge remaining to her was Milly; but after all to superintend the education of a child is very different from the many and various occupations which belong to the guidance of a family, the regulation of all domestic affairs, the interests moral and material with which she had been accustomed to deal. A general deprived of his command, a sailor with his ship taken from him, could not have been more at a loss than this young woman, suddenly deprived of the occupations which had given character and meaning to all her past existence. She sat down drearily in Miss Jean’s best room, amid all the dark old furniture, leaning her elbows upon an old escritoire which had belonged to her great-grandfather, and fixing her eyes unaware upon a portrait of that great-grandfather’s mother. All around her was old, shadowy, still. It seemed to her that she herself had glided into the midst of those shadows to take a permanent place among them. The long silent procession of ancestors and ancestresses seemed to take possession of her, to draw her, a silent follower into their silent train. The very house and room seemed to exercise a certain fascination over her. They seemed to put their veto upon all change, novelty, movement of every kind. The High Street of Comlie, grass-grown and silent, the monotonous continued cadence of the sea, the little round of occupations which were no occupations, the position of spectator, sometimes bitterly, always disapprovingly critical of everything that went on at the house she had once ruled--was this all that remained for Marjory Hay-Heriot at twenty-five, as it was all that had fallen to the lot of Jean Hay-Heriot, and of many a proud silent gentlewoman besides, who had lived and died so, and scorned to complain?