For a very short time after her father's death, Mabel seemed to take a pleasure in roaming about the gardens and woods from which she had been debarred so long; but the walks grew gradually shorter, and she soon shut herself up in the house entirely, seeing only a few of her near relatives. It was one of these who, at her own request, painted the second portrait--a rude performance, but it must have been a likeness. She seemed to feel an odd sort of satisfaction in looking at the two and comparing them. Her brain was somewhat clouded and unsteady; but I fancy she was counting up all the harm and wrong the hard world had done to her, and calculating what amends would be made in the next. I doubt not they were kind and pitiful and indulgent enough there; but on earth she found no source of comfort strong enough to banish from her eyes that terrible look which haunted them within five minutes of her end. When spirits assemble from the four corners of heaven, how many thousand companions, think you, will greet the Gileadite's daughter? Before you saw Cecil Tresilyan's face, the curve of her neck, and the way her head was set on it, told you that she was by no means exempt from the family failing which had laid its hand so heavily on her ancestors. Yet it was not a hard or habitually haughty, or even a very decided face. There was nothing alarmingly severe about the slight aquiline of the nose; the chin did not look as if it were "carved in marble," or "clasped in steel," or as if it were made of any thing but soft flesh prettily dimpled; the delicate scarlet lip, when it curled, rarely went beyond sauciness; though the splendid violet eyes could well express disdain, this was not their favorite expression--and they had many. The head would certainly have been too small had it not been for the glossy masses of dark chestnut hair sweeping down low all round it, smooth and unbroken as a deep river in its first curl over a cataract. Candid friends said her complexion was not bright enough; perhaps they were right; but the color had not forgotten how to come and go there at fitting seasons; at any rate, the grand clear white could never be mistaken for an unhealthy pallor. An extraordinarily good constitution was ever part of a Tresilyan's inheritance; and if you doubted whether her blood circulated freely you had only to compare her cheek on a bitter March day with some red-and-white ones, when a sharp east wind had forced those last to mount _all_ the stripes of the tricolor. By the way, are not the "roses dipped in milk" going out of fashion just now? A humble but stanch adherent of the house of York, I like to think--how many battle-fields, since Towton, our Flower has won!