And all through this great silent house there was a thrill of uncertainty,--nobody knowing what was to be done, or what the _new régime_ would be. The little lord in the nursery, poor little delicate boy who would never be “rared” as all the country people said, who was a child of old age, with madness on one side of the house, whose father was dead and whose mother denied his existence: and the poor lady shut up in her rooms, in her grief and widowhood, with the maid who was nurse, and the mad-doctor hanging about, ever watchful, not leaving her long out of his sight--the troubled group who hung about her, and about the child, yet had no real right there, and might be put to the door by the executors any day--made up a miserable family--a disturbed, uncertain, uncomfortable, little community--not knowing what was to happen. The only one in the house who was calm, who feared nothing, was Mary herself in her retirement, half cured of her madness, full of gentle sorrow without anguish, and ignoring altogether in a strange bewilderment of nature all the dangers and miseries amid which, the most innocent of unconscious sufferers, she was about to take up without protection or support the strange story of her life. CHAPTER XXVII. Lady Frogmore had not been much disturbed by any external interruption since she had been led away from her husband’s room after his death. Poor Mary was very natural in all her ways. She took her sorrow sweetly like the gentle woman she was. There was an hour or two during which she lay weeping on the bed, saying now and then some broken words--how good he was, her dear old lord, how tender, how kind--and what was she to do without him who had been so good to his poor Mary! Agnes not crying so much, feeling the dreadful blank and change perhaps more, sat by her sister’s bedside and held her hand, and received her broken confidences. Poor Mary did not repine, she did not even grieve as at first that she had not been there when Frogmore was taken ill, that they did not send for her soon enough. Even that had floated away from her mind. The tears came flowing from her eyes and the tender words from her lips. Dear Frogmore! There never had been any one like him, so kind! so kind! How was she to live without her old husband, her dear companion? In Mary’s mind there was no consciousness that she had been absent from her husband for years; yet, perhaps, though she was not aware of it, this fact had something to do with the calm of her sorrow. There was no despair in her mourning. By-and-bye she allowed herself to be undressed, to take the draught prepared for her and go to bed. Agnes still sat by her thinking of many things, but it did not occur to anybody that Agnes had anything but a very secondary part in the trouble. And Mary slept and woke again and shed more tears, and then rose up with a patient face and a quiver in her lip, and was very anxious that a black gown might be