"It has a rushing mighty sound like the wings of a relentless fate," said Margaret, dreamily; "I never was so near a river before." "Do you like being so near it? Some people think it disturbs them; that louder noise through all is the waterfall. Come and have some tea now, and, when you are rested, we will go by the river-walk." "Everything is so lovely," she exclaimed, as she followed Mrs. Dorriman into the bright little drawing-room, and noticed the pretty freshness of everything. She was delighted with her own room, which was looking towards the sea. "How you must have felt leaving all this!" she exclaimed as she looked out upon it all. "I did feel it then, but you soon became my great comfort and pleasure. I am glad I went, for many reasons, but one chief reason is that I learnt to know you there." Margaret had but one vision of the sea in her memory. She had thought the grand sweep of the bay and the mouth of the Clyde heavenly, and it lingered in her memory as she had watched it with Grace that first night, and had been so entranced with its smooth beauty, upon which the moonlight had thrown such a lovely and silvery veil. But with all the associations of that place and the vivid remembrance of Sir Albert Gerald's yacht gliding into the bright moonlit streak, like a bird ready to fold her wings and rest,--she felt that there could be no comparison. No sea, rippling in smoothly, far away from the turbulence and strife, sheltered in the great arms of a bay nearly surrounding it, smiling there even when fierce and angry beyond the shelter, can possibly equal in grandeur the same sea crashing in against perpendicular rocks, dashing itself with terrific strength against an iron-bound coast, as though scorning the obstacles in front of it; and Margaret, her whole heart tender and sensitive to impressions of natural beauty, was carried out of herself by this new scene, so suddenly presented to her. How small, how little, seemed the former ideas she had had of the place. She was too full of thought to speak much, and her silence suited Mrs. Dorriman, who, while striving to keep every word she said away from subjects likely to touch upon poor Margaret's loss, betrayed by the very pains she took, by her sudden pauses and the hesitation of her manner, that there was an expectation on her side of some emotion she did not wish to arouse. This would not do. There were some things in Margaret's life that she could never touch upon with any one. Her husband's madness had been very terrible, so terrible that she never willingly allowed it to remain in her mind, and she never mentioned him.