All this makes for an entertaining story. The family history and the mystery of the will are complex enough to keep the reader on the hook. A high-born cousin steps in late in the game to help Miss Mackenzie think a bit more of herself. Mrs. Mackenzie, wife to another cousin who lives far away in Scotland, comes to London for a while and tells Margaret how the cow ate the cabbage. She tells her she is sure that Miss Mackenzie will become Lady Margaret by marrying John Ball, morose though he may be. Her instrument is a muslin flecked with black to replace the mourning that Margaret had been wearing in memory of her brother and then her uncle. A "make-belief mourning bonnet" is tossed in, and these are to be worn to the Negro Soldiers' Orphan Bazaar, at which John Ball sees her in something other than all-black mourning, and both of them get the hint that all need not be dark. This is a little set-piece in which two old favorites appear to play cameo roles: Lady Glencora Palliser, who steps out of the Palliser series, and Lady Hartletop, known to readers of the Barsetshire series as Griselda Grantly. Lady Hartletop is not referred to by her Christian name, because the name Griselda is already in use in reference to Miss Mackenzie. ("'But you must positively bring Grieselda,' said Lady Glencora Palliser.") Readers of Trollope's day were more aware than those of today that Griselda figured in several folk tales, including Boccaccio's _Decameron_ and Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale" in_ The Canterbury Tales_, as the personification of patience and obedience. In the former version, a Marquis marries Griselda and tells her that their first two children must be put to death, and then he tells her that he has received papal dispensation to divorce her. She is put away for years, brought back only to witness the wedding of the divorced Marquis. In this ceremony she is told that it is all a joke, and she is restored to her place as wife and mother of the children, who were never killed after all. Some joke; one wonders if her sense of humor is up to it. Earlier in the book Margaret is referred to as Mariana in the moated grange, who waits vainly for her lover in Tennyson's poem "Mariana": _She only said, 'The night is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!'_ Another image comes to mind in reading _Miss Mackenzie_: that of Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp who revolutionized nursing with her service to the English troops in the Crimea. This revolution was probably still a work in progress when Trollope wrote _Miss Mackenzie_, describing her resolution to be a hospital nurse as a fall-back option if none of her matrimonial plans worked out. She cared for one brother for fifteen years, and when her brother Tom was on his deathbed, she assumed the role again.