Half an hour, and the accident had happened which made them orphans and their mother a widow. Captain Fenner was riding a young horse unaccustomed to the London streets; he had ridden it in the country for some months, and being a perfect horseman, mounted without apprehension, but, unhappily, the nervous creature took fright, and, after a wild rush of some two or three hundred yards, flung his rider heavily on the pavement. To the amazement and horror of everyone he was taken up lifeless. Without a word, without a look, he was gone for ever from among men. The event was too solemn to be mourned in the ordinary way. Men gazed at each other with white, awestruck faces, and spoke beneath their breath, as he was borne back to the home which he had just quitted in full health and strength. How many weak-hearted, weak-willed men, who lived for their own pleasure, with scarce a consciousness of the higher life, might have been taken and the world not palpably the worse; but this strong-hearted, strongwilled man, on the very threshold of a noble career, lay slain by what seemed the merest accident in the heart of his native country, almost within sound of his children’s voices. “Truly the Lord’s ways are not our ways, and they are wonderful in our eyes.” Margaret sat stunned in her sorrow. Deep in her smitten heart lay the consciousness that with him all was well; softly in the sleepless night she whispered his name, softly her cold hands lingered on the heads and hair of her children; but her eyes were dry, her voice dead within her, until her friends, in a mistaken hope of helping her, consulted together in her hearing about taking away the children. Then the strong chill gave way, the blood rushed into her pale cheeks, she stood up, and, holding each child by the shoulder, she looked into the faces of her amazed friends. “Bear with me,” she said; and her voice was dry and hard, but it became more natural as she proceeded. “Bear with me for awhile; I am weak, but I shall be strong in time. These are Michael’s children; you must not take them from me.” Then bending down to her children she kissed them, praying them also to be patient with her, and said they would help each other, and, from that day forward she was first in their thoughts, they in hers. With patient care she devoted herself to all the duties of that sad time, and when Michael Fenner was laid to rest in the country churchyard, where many of his forefathers slept, she set herself to master all the circumstances of her position, and to ascertain the means at her disposal for her own maintenance and the maintenance and education of her children. Friends shook their heads and pitied “those poor Fenners,” but there was not one with whom Margaret would have changed lots; for had she not the memory of her love and the care of those little children who were his as well as hers?