She knew, too, that to do so would be a bitter pang, well nigh to the breaking of the heart that felt it; and although, for her own part, there was scarcely a pretty cottage in the neighbourhood in which she could not have made her home with cheerfulness and happiness, she looked forward with painful apprehension to the time when her father might have to quit the Manor House, and discharge the old servants who had served him so long, and be no more what he had been amongst the many who looked up to and reverenced him. Such was one dark subject of contemplation; the death of Lord Harold was another. She thought of him as she had seen him the evening before, full of youth, and health, and energy; she thought of him as she had seen him in other days, full of joy and gaiety, and that bright exuberant life which it is difficult to imagine can ever be extinguished, when we gaze upon it in all its activity and brightness; and yet a single moment had ended it for ever. Her mind then turned to the father of him who was gone; and she pictured him sitting in his lonely halls, childless, solitary, desolate, left without hope and without consolation to pass through the chill winter of his age, till he reached the dark and cheerless resting-place of the tomb. She pitied him from her very heart; she could have wept for him; but then her thoughts turned to Langford, and she asked herself, if it were possible that a man who had just suffered so severely as Lord Danemore himself, could seek to bring misery and sorrow upon others? Abstractedly, she would have thought such a thing impossible; but when she reflected upon the character of the man, she felt but too deeply convinced that his own misery would but make him seek to render others as miserable; that his despair would be bitter and turbulent, not calm and mild; and that to see the hearths of others desolate, the hearts of others broken, would in all probability be the consolation he would choose. She was pondering sadly upon these gloomy subjects of contemplation, as well upon that chief and still more absorbing one, the situation of him whom she so dearly loved, when the servant Halliday appeared to announce to her that Master Kinsight, Lord Danemore's attorney, was at the gate, and would not go away. He had told him, the servant said, that his worship was out, and that she herself was busy, and not to be disturbed; "but he still hangs there, Mistress Alice," continued the man, "and he is no way civil; so much so, indeed, that if I did not know his worship is averse to having anybody cudgelled, I would drub him for his pains." "Do no such thing, Halliday," replied Alice, "but bring him in here; I will speak to him myself."