Thus her heart was sick with more than grief--with the sense as of a heavy curtain which had fallen over her life, an ending put to all that was worthy of being called life in it. Her existence had stopped, but she continued. How many of us have felt this! and what poor expedients some are put to, to invent for themselves such excuses for living as may cheat the vacancy into some reasonable semblance! This cannot happen, fortunately, at twenty-five; but Marjory felt, as was natural, that twenty-five was a great age, and that she had outlived all the new openings, all the possibilities of youthful existence. Miss Hay-Heriot, of the High Street of Comlie, like her great-aunt Jean, and many great-aunts before that, with all the use died out of her, and nothing to do but live. If she had been brought up to it, Marjory thought to herself, she would have minded less; but what a strange and dismal contrast from the life she had been brought up to--the busy existence full of care which she had lived only a fortnight since, appealed to on every side, found fault with, looked up to, with so many disagreeable offices thrust upon her, and work which she would gladly have got rid of! Now she had got rid of all her work at a stroke, and the cares seemed happiness to her in comparison with the blank which their absence left. When her thoughts came to this point, however, they changed with a sudden start and spring. For there was something she had to do which no one now would dream of interfering with. It was late by this time, the middle of the night in Comlie, where everybody was up by six o’clock, and Marjory was half afraid to move about the old room, where every board creaked under her foot. But she opened her box, which was near her, and took from it poor Tom’s little desk, in which she had found his bills and his useless treasures. From thence she took out the packet which she had made up so carefully with the list and calculations which had given her so much trouble, and which it had grieved her so much to think of explaining to her father. Her father had got off without hearing of them, without any posthumous stab from his dead son. The stab had gone into Marjory’s breast to have the edge blunted, and there it remained. Surely, she thought, with some natural tears, some good angel had watched over him, to give him an easy dismissal out of this hard world. He had never known that Tom had deceived him; he had never known that Charlie had died. But some one must always pay the penalty for such exemptions. Marjory took out her own calculations in the middle of the night, in the stillness, among all the shadows, and looked at the list ruefully enough. There was nobody now but herself to do it. Tom’s memory was nothing to the new possessors of Pitcomlie, to no one, indeed, except herself, and perhaps one other, one helpless creature, who was breaking her heart it might be, somewhere, with no right to mourn, no power to vindicate.