The shock of her death did more to bring poor Isabel to her senses than the harshest tyranny could have done. It seemed a very retribution on her for her sins; and I doubt, if it had been possible to marry her then offhand, but she would have acquiesced in her fate--with despairing, perhaps, but without further revolt. The thought that during all this time, while her mother had been sojourning for her health’s sake at Versailles, she had been planning in her guilty soul an act which, if committed, would have struck the deadliest of blows at the pride and trusting affection, possibly at the life itself, of that beloved parent, filled her with inexpressible remorse. She went in these days with a face so pale and scared, that one might have believed her haunted by the thought of her own direct responsibility for the tragedy. The very memory of what had been seemed to her a profanation to the sainted dead. She strove to cleanse her conscience of all offence, even to the lingering shadow of a dream which now could never come to be realised. She told herself so: it was ended and finally; how, even if but one star from its firmament were allowed to twinkle on, could she kneel and pray, without blasphemy, for the repose of her mother’s soul? To her father, in this emotional reaction, she wistfully and naturally turned. Their common sorrow brought them closer together than they had ever been as yet; and, while mothering his weakness and his distress, she bitterly reproached herself for all that past unfilial attitude of hers towards what she had considered his shallowness and vanity. Now she recognised, or believed that she recognised, how much more fondly wise than its chosen expression had been the purpose underlying that attempt of his upon her faith. She no longer blamed him for it, because his method had been simply characteristic. It had been characteristic, indeed, as was no less the selfish quality of his present grief. He bewailed his loss, almost as if it implied some treachery to himself. Having grown resigned in submission to the stronger will, to which he had conceded the practical management of all his affairs of State and policy, he felt as if cruelly abandoned by it at that moment in the promised maturation of its schemes when its support was most needed. It was always his helplessness rather than his sorrow that came uppermost in the tale of woe; and perhaps to the heart of the woman and potential mother that made the surest appeal. In ministering to his despair Isabella forgot her own.