How different an aspect the house presented from the bustle and the sociality of the days gone by! A stillness, as of a dead city, reigned. Rooms that had re-echoed with merry voices and light footsteps above, with the ring of gold and the tones of busy men below, were now silent and deserted. No change of any kind had yet been made in the household arrangements, but that was soon to come. The servants would be discharged, the costly furniture was already marked for the hammer; Mrs. Webb must leave, and--what was to be the course of Miss Castlemaine? She had not even asked herself the question, while the engagement with Mr. Blake-Gordon remained officially unbroken. The butler opened the door to him and ushered him into the drawing-room. Mary came forward to greet him with her pale, sad face--a face that startled her lover. He clasped her to him, and she burst into sobs and tears. There are moments of anguish when pride gives way. "Oh, my darling!" he cried, scarcely less agitated than herself, "you are feeling this cruel decision almost unto death! Why did you write that letter?--why did you not remain firm?--and thereby tacitly insist on our engagement being fulfilled?" Never had his weakness of nature been more betrayed than then. "Why did not she insist?"--as if conscious that he was powerless to do it! She felt it keenly: she felt that in this, at least, a gulf lay between them. "What I have done is for the best," she said, gently disengaging herself, and suppressing the signs of her emotion, as she motioned him to a seat. "In my altered circumstances I felt--at least I feared--that no happiness could await our marriage. Your father, in the first place, would never have given his consent." "There are times when duty to a father should give place to duty to one's self," he returned, forgetting how singularly this argument was contradicted by his own conduct. "All my happiness in life is over." "As you wrote to me," she said. "But by-and-by, when you shall have forgotten all this, William, and time has brought things round, you will meet with some one who will be able to make you happy: perhaps as much so as I should have done: and you will look back on these days as a dream." "Mary!" "And it will be better so." "And you?" he asked, with a stifled groan of remorse. "I?" she returned, with a smile half sad, half derisive. "I am nobody now. You have a place to fill in the world; I shall soon be heard of no more." "But where are you going to live, Mary? You have nothing left out of the wreck." "I have a little. Enough for my future wants. At present I shall go on a visit to Greylands' Rest. My uncle urges it, and he is the nearest representative of my father. Depend upon it, I shall meet with some occupation in life that will make me contented if not happy." "Until you marry," he said. "Marry some man more noble than I; more worthy of you."