Some days after Mr. Ponsonby’s visit, Mary Westbury saw from her room, where she happened to be sitting, a carriage drive up the avenue. It was only about twelve o’clock, an unusual hour for visitors; and the carriage was of the order known as a fly, with just such a white horse, and coachman in white cotton gloves, as had made an important feature in the landscape to Ben Renton seven years before in Guildford Street, Manchester Square; but there was not, of course, any connexion in Mary’s mind between such a vehicle and her cousin’s brief romance. She watched it, with a little surprise, as it came up. Who could it be? There was somehow, a greater than ordinary attempt to look like a private carriage about this particular vehicle, with, as might have been expected, a failure still more marked. And flys of any description were not well known at Renton. The lodge-keeper had looked at it disdainfully when she opened the gate; and the butler, who was standing at the door, received the card of the visitors with a certain mixture of condescension and contempt. ‘For Miss Westbury,’ he said, giving it to a passing maid to carry up-stairs, and only deigning, after an interval, to show the visitors into the drawing-room. The card which was brought to Mary had a very deep black border, and the name of Mrs. Henry Rich printed in the little square of white. Who was Mrs. Henry Rich? There had been very little intercourse between the Riches and the Rentons since Frank’s marriage; but Mary recollected with an effort, when she turned her mind that way, that one of the sons had died some time before, and that he turned out to have been married, and to have left an unknown widow to be provided for after he died. These facts came quite dimly to her mind as she pondered the name. But she had never heard who the widow was, and could not think what a stranger in such circumstances could want with her. ‘I don’t know them well enough to do her any good,’ Mary said to herself. The border was so black, and the fly had impressed her with such a feeling of poverty,--wrongly, to be sure, for of course had Mrs. Henry Rich possessed a dozen carriages she could scarcely have brought them with her to Cookesley,--that the idea of a weeping widow seeking something very like charity, was suggested to Mary by the name, and the deep mourning, and the hour of the visit. Civility demanded of her that she should see this unexpected visitor. ‘But I must tell her we see very little of them, and that I can do nothing,’ Mary said to herself as she went down-stairs. She was dressed in one of her fresh, pretty muslins, pink and white, with all the pretty, crisp bits of lace and bows of ribbon that makes up that toilette _fraîche et simple_, which is one of the greatest triumphs of millinery, and next to impossible to any but the rich. And a pleasant figure to behold was Mary amid the sunshine, in the calm of the stately, silent house which was so familiar