He stands Between me and a brave inheritance. I may depend on you? ’Twere too late To doubt it. Let no foolish pity shake Your bosom! Byron. The flight of Helen Grahame from her home was not followed by a convulsion of the household. Its internal economy proceeded with the same regularity as before. Mrs. Grahame, _minus_ her grand and beautiful eldest daughter--the pride of her family--would, it was only natural to expect, have been overwhelmed by agony, distress, apprehension and unutterable woe at her mysterious bereavement. Love of offspring is the prominent element of maternity. A she-bear is a most loving mother, though its nature is none of the tenderest. Mrs. Grahame might reasonably be credited with much mental suffering, in consequence of the flight of her child, considering too how elegant, how accomplished, how handsome that child was. To say that she remained unaffected by any of the emotions commonly produced by such an event, would be, perhaps, advancing too much; to say that she displayed none of them--no, not one, is only truth. Whatever might have been stirred up in the inner recesses of a nature whose depths no mortal, save herself, had plumbed, remained concealed. She permitted no line of anxious care to invade the regularity of her smooth brow, nor did she allow her coldly placid bearing, or the existing arrangements governing her daily movements, to undergo any change. Miss Grahame had left her home. Whither she had gone, wherefore, or in what manner, she considered, from her point of view, to be that young lady’s business alone. She was herself the last person in the world to offer explanations to any one upon domestic occurrences. As well might such a surrender of dignity be expected from imperial majesty. To the inquiries of friends, it would be enough to say that Miss Grahame was absent, and that was the only decided step she determined upon taking in the really terrible event. She would, it is true, have gladly plied her servants with the waters of Lethe, so that the past, which in any way took in Miss Grahame, might be forgotten by them; but she made no allusion to her; and, discharging, at a moment’s notice, Chayter, Helen’s maid, sternly forbade her own attendant, or any other member of the household, to repeat her daughter’s name in her presence. Margaret Grahame wasted not her powers of imagination in endeavouring to divine why her sister Helen had fled. She rather looked upon the circumstance as one that had rid her of a formidable rival, and she fixed her sluggish, single thought yet more steadfastly upon the young Duke of St. Allborne.