Agnes gave her mother a look, and laid her hand upon her sister’s. “There is one other thing, Mary,” she said, turning the talk to the mourning. There are times when that mourning is a great relief to the poor people who are shut up with their sorrow and can talk of nothing but the one dreadful subject which fills heaven and earth. Mary returned to the thought of all those necessary gowns for the housemaids with a sort of dismal relief. But when she was left to herself again, her thoughts returned to Letitia--Letitia was coming in the afternoon. There was in Lady Frogmore’s thoughts a faint terror of her former friend mingled with a sort of consolatory consciousness that Letitia could have nothing against her now. All must be right now. Mary’s little superiority was over. She would not have been sorry had it not involved the loss of Frogmore, and now that he was gone it was a consolation to think that she no longer stood in anybody’s way, that she could injure no one any more. Letitia would forgive her now. There had been no harm done. She could not regret--no, not even for Letitia, that she had married her dear old lord. It seemed to Mary that it had been a very short time, only a few months, since she married Frogmore. And it had done no harm. Letitia would have to acknowledge that now. They were none the worse for it. It gave her a little consolation in the midst of her tears. Meanwhile John Parke and his wife were traveling gloomily towards Frogmore. It would be vain to say that even John, his brother, was deeply affected by the death of the old lord. That would have been too much to expect in any case. Neither could it be said that during five years past they had thought of nothing but the wrong inflicted upon them by Lord Frogmore’s marriage, and the birth of the boy who stood between them and all their hopes of advancement in life. In five years the mind gets accustomed even to such a misfortune as that, and though they may not feel it less, people don’t dwell upon a thing so far off as they did when it was fresh in their minds. The death of Lord Frogmore, however, brought it all back to their thoughts. But for Mary, but for that boy, what a changed world it would now have been for them! By this time it was they who would have been Lord and Lady Frogmore. They would have been going to take possession of their own great family house, to come into their fortune. Hope would by this time have become reality to them--if it had not been for Mary and that miserable puny boy. Even John could not help thinking of this as he looked moodily out of the window of the railway carriage and plucked at his moustache. His servants would already have begun to ‘my lord’ him. His difficulties (for he had difficulties though his wife was so excellent a manager) would all have been over. Good God! and to think that a bit of a sickly child, a creature that nobody wanted, had done him out of all that. It was enough to distract the mind of a saint.