"Happy!" cried the old lady, turning round upon him with an echo not to be described by words in her voice. Then she paused, with a humorous smile on her face; "I'm an old woman, and should be a good adviser; but I never was a good adviser, as your Uncle Edward will tell you. Now everybody knows that when two young fools marry upon nothing, it's not only one of the greatest follies the world is acquainted with, but _exceedingly wrong_." Mrs. Melrose pronounced these words with great unction and emphasis. Could anybody doubt that she believed them thoroughly? But there was meanwhile a suspicious twinkle in her bright old eyes. "And yet General Melrose was only a lieutenant," said Roger, "when--" "When I married him, blessings on him!" cried the old lady, "he was but an ensign--that I should dare say so before young people!--but you can make an example and a beacon of me, Susan, my dear. Yes, it was years and years long before he was _General_ Melrose, Mr. Musgrave; such years! years of trouble and toil and misery and happiness. Ah! Edward, they're gone and past, these years! Nothing but one thing will happen now to you and me, and that, please God, will give us back to them all." To them all! There was a silence in the room after these words. Tears sprang to the eyes of the young people in that tender, pitiful youth of theirs, which could not understand how to be content without happiness; but there were no tears in the old eyes which met in such a pathetic cheerful glance, and understood each other beyond all interpretation of words. Dear life, which they could still live cheerfully, all shorn and diminished as it was, for His sake who gave it, and out of the most natural humanity of their Christian hearts!--but dearer was the end and termination, the day of that holy death which should restore _them all_. But the evening was not sad after that, as a vulgar fancy might suppose. The old people were very cheerful, brighter than youth itself in the serenity of their old age; and Mrs. Melrose, who had been considered a very clever woman all her life by half the Indian service, and who had more actual humour and appreciation of the same than all her three auditors put together, kept Roger and Susan breathless with her recollections, her anecdotes, her sallies of quiet fun. She consented to stay all night, at her brother-in-law's request and Susan's anxious entreaty, and took Roger entirely under her protection, and treated him "like a boy of her own." "But I cannot understand," said the old lady reprovingly, as she bade her brother good night, "when you spoke of Susan and her delicacies, why you did not say there was anything particular in the business, or that this was not any person, but the special young man."